Alan Schaaf
Alan Schaaf

We've talked with over a dozen VCs and angel investors over the years. But we've never clicked with any of them until Andreessen. During our initial meeting, we were bouncing ideas around about where Imgur could go.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Like many other banks and finance companies, Green Tree used a process called securitization to resell its home loans to outside investors. Green Tree grouped thousands of these small loans into a pool worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company could not, although Fannie Mae explicitly says that its bonds do not carry a federal guarantee.

Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson

On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.