Veteran oilman Boone Pickens proved prescient when he told CNN’s Larry King on May 27 that BP’s efforts to plug the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by its “top kill” effort would most likely fail; BP abandoned the effort just a few days later. It is another matter whether Pickens was savvy enough to profitably dump his shares of Transocean, the Swiss company that owned the rig that blew up on April 20.BP Capital Management, Pickens’ hedge fund and no relation to the British oil giant, had one of the biggest positions in Transocean of any hedge fund at the end of the first quarter, the latest date for which regulatory filings are publicly available. While only a few hedge funds were invested in the much larger BP at that time, Transocean was a big hedge fund play. Its shares, like those of BP, have fallen about...