Let’s be clear. Investing money is really about one of at least three things: structuring a pool of capital to meet stated goals, simply making money as lifestyle support(also known as a career) and freeing up space underneath the mattress, let’s say to store more guitars when the designated household space looks cramped.

Successfully investing money over the long run involves a combination of being generally right and avoiding being terribly wrong – either in asset or security selection and sizing.

So, I call general BS on the efforts noted below — as noted in a recent Financial Times article.

Doing actual industry and company work? Seems novel, but sort of not. Hiring journalists to do actual work rather than some linear being raised from an undergraduate business school pod? Nothing remotely new, but it is not unhelpful in enhancing “diverse” thought in an investment process. Buying — or shorting — a stock and then bulling the hell out of it through any public means necessary? Not quite the world’s oldest profession but it’s up there.

Any read of the history of investing way before a causal meeting under a tree on Wall Street has noted the history of talking up your position. So we have gone from verbal, to smoke signals, to lunch meetings, to telegraph, to phone, to radio, TV and Jim Cramer, and to social media. What’s new except for scaling improvement? The endeavor below “might” have some early success in day-trading what I am sure will be highly publicized pitches, and assuming some basic regulatory compliance – so what?

But success in the long run is about being right. The announcement that Buffett — and I mean the Warren kind — takes a position, can be a stock mover is because of a pretty decent track record of being right. The same is true for Hindenburg Research, which has done a pretty nice job on the short-side.

Summing up: do work, take a position, and have it be recognized as ‘right” by all legal means necessary.

As a side note, I was one of the first outside writers for The Street, which was a lot more interesting and fun in the day than things look presently. And I was doing it for fun and charitable contributions, not to put a roof over my head. “Journalists” have always shilled for people with positions because the job calls for information exchange under deadline.

There is nothing wrong with attempting to up your tax bracket. It’s just nothing special.

The firm taking market-moving stories to a new level

What if we told you that we had some market-moving news and the means by which to trade on it?
That’s pretty much the idea behind Hunterbrook, a new trading firm launched by a group of veteran financial journalists and investors who plan to make money on stories unearthed by its own investigative reporting, the FT revealed earlier this week.

The start-up is founded by investor Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and writer Sam Koppelman, with former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray as an adviser through his role with Hunterbrook investor Outside the Box Investments.

It’s a seemingly simple concept but one that sits in a grey area, if not legally then at least ethically.

How the project will operate is still being hashed out. But the basic concept is that a group of journalists will write the kind of investigative stories you find in mainstream news outlets and a separate set of investment professionals will have access to the news before it’s published to help them make better trading decisions.

“Rather than try to predict or react to events, we time trades on news we break ourselves,” Horwitz wrote to potential investors in a letter seen by the FT.

(The FT was told, however, that Hunterbrook doesn’t plan to trade on information not already publicly available . . . if that wasn’t already obvious.)

This isn’t the first time traders and journalists have come to work together. Many hedge funds hire reporters for their investigative skills to help them spot news trends. But once reporters shift to the investment side they can’t go around pretending to be journalists.

The closest comparison is activist short seller Hindenburg Research, which is known for hiring journalists. Another interesting example is Mark Cuban’s investment in the now-defunct Sharesleuth.com, which also combined reporting and investing. It didn’t end well for Cuban’s venture. Here you can find a few articles about that failed experiment.

Hunterbrook aims to be different, according to people DD talked to. But we still don’t know exactly how.

Investors seem unfazed by the lack of clarity (maybe they also have access to the news before it gets published) and are very keen for a slice of the action. The fund had raised $10mn in seed funding and is targeting a $100mn launch for its fund, according to two people involved.

The list of early backers includes General Catalyst founder David Fialkow, Avenue Capital’s Marc Lasry, founders of RA Capital Management and former JPMorgan Chase chief investment officer Matt Cherwin, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Other investors include a former US solicitor general and quantitative traders from funds including Jane Street, Balyasny Asset Management, Millennium Management and the venture capital arm of Emerson Collective — the philanthropic organisation run by Laurene Powell Jobsthat is the majority owner of The Atlantic magazine.

DD finds it interesting that Watchdog was a name floated early on for the news unit, given that it will undoubtedly catch the attention of securities watchdogs who haven’t yet encountered this novel trading strategy.

. . . Or as the FT’s Robert Armstrong calls it, a hedge fund.