Over the weekend, a colleague of mine explained the Bernie Madoff fraud to me in the following plausible way:
While many dopey investors in Madoff's funds thought he was actually running a "split strike option" strategy (and most of those people had no idea what that meant), most of the smart investors didn't. They just thought he was using the trading order flow from his securities firm to run a lucrative insider-trading operation, and they were happy to get a piece of it.
To that way of thinking, the "split strike" thing was seen by wise-guys as just a clumsy cover, but one that they were cool with. And that, while goofy, makes more sense to me than believing that so many smart investors bought that Madoff was running a strategy that most knew couldn't work the way he claimed it had.
So, imagine how pissed those wise-guy investors were when they found out that Madoff wasn't running the fraud that they thought he was. Instead, he was running a different fraud. Woo-hoo, hell hath no fury like a cynic out-cynic-ed.
