By Kit R. Roane
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Mike Masters: I have a
Christian worldview
Photographs by Michael Rubenstein |
Mike Masters, a six-and-a-half-foot former all-American swimmer, is used to pushing against the current. Over the past four years, he has repeatedly bucked his hedge fund brethren by calling for financial reforms and has laid into both investment banks and institutional investors for piling into commodity derivatives, which he believes have spiked prices and hammered the poor.
“I have a Christian worldview,” Masters says unapologetically of his Capitol Hill activities. “Investing is not just about efficiency, and not everything is an investment, even if it is theoretically uncorrelated. There are bigger ideas out there.”
But these days he’s battling a turbulent current of a different sort: declining hedge fund returns. The roughly $200 million he runs through Masters Capital Management has fallen by more than 12% through July 2011, compared with a gain...