So on Monday we gave the indomitable Tim Sykes a bit of a kicking while he was down. Then today we discovered he has his own PR agent. So maybe we weren’t kicking hard enough.
Apparently, Tim’s PRs are clued up on the whole no news is bad news strategy:
For those who know Sykes as the bathrobe clad pseudo-celebrity day trader who fells an electric fan after a particularly sour trade and whose mom would travel one-and-a-half hours each way to clean his NYC apartment every other week, Sykes’ candor in AN AMERICAN HEDGE FUND comes as no surprise.
There are clearly serious issues here.
(Fao Tim’s agent: pseudo - adj. fake, spurious, sham, almost, counterfeit)
For those of you who didn’t read yesterday’s post, here’s a short TimintroTM:
Tim is perhaps best known as the latest reality television star of Wall Street Warriors, a six-part documentary with a cult following among young males who idolize traders, hedge fund managers and other dealmakers.
…which is all a bit American Psycho. Now nobody’s saying Tim Sykes dances around naked in his mirrored apartment while wielding a chainsaw, but in three paragraphs of press release we’ve heard about his mom, Wall Street, his bathrobe and his cult following of young males.
Anyway, that’s all quickly dispelled. Apparently Sykes is just a “self-effacing and unpretentious nice Jewish kid from Orange, Connecticut”
The gist of the press release is that Tim is shutting his hedge fund, Cilantro - selected by Barclays as the number one short bias hedge fund three years running, so he must have been doing something right - and launching a book. He also turned $13,000 into just shy of $2m trading for himself out of college.
But Cilantro has suffered badly recently and “friends” have been coming out of the woodwork to give the former trader a drubbing. In the interests of balance - since we’ve quoted from Tim’s PR so much, here’s a selection of his critics posting on Dealbreaker:
Sykes is the biggest attention whore I have seen in a long time. He is like Paris Hilton without the talent.
- TimOK/BookSUCKS
Timothy Sykes, our resident idiot and attention slut, shares his “fooled by randomness” experiences in a shitty book which is not worth $20….
- SykesBook=toiletpaper
The only humor in this, is that Tim is actually being serious. It is just a shame that he is the only one who takes himself seriously.
- Anonymous
Tim is looking forward to shutting Cilantro, not least because it will allow him to finally tell after all this kissing:
Sykes envisions October 1 as a sort of Independence Day, when free from the shackles of SEC regulations he will be able to detail Cilantro’s complete trading history - the winners and the losers.
Alas:
Tim’s been getting a lot of hate mail lately though it hasn’t been from his flagging fund’s investors (most of whom are Tim’s friends and family members).
Hang on. Family members? What happened to the $Xbn hedge fund we were thinking of? Now it just sounds like some honky-tonk investment club named after a herb.
Either that, or the big guys have jumped ship. Who knows.
Anyway. Enough already. Tim may have a big ego, but we kinda like the guy. He’s only 26. Take a look at his book.
