Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.

[The] Lara Croft: Tomb Raider ... I would certainly be thrilled.

The 1969 experience has been a rude awakening for many hedge-fund investors and has left some of them with strong reservations about the whole concept. For the first time in their relatively short history, the funds are not growing: in fact, some have suffered large withdrawals of capital, and a few have actually folded.

Wage concessions are difficult to quantify, since their magnitude depends on many operating variables.

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.

In general, the hedge funds were clobbered by the 1969 bear market, ending up in many cases with records that were worse than those put together by aggressive mutual funds denied the luxury of short sales.