Troubled Hedge Fund Harbinger Capital, It Founder Under Investigation, Loses 47%

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Harbinger Capital’s main hedge fund lost 47% of its value last year. It was not the only bad news for founder Phil Falcone who is under investigation for violating securities laws.

Most of the loss was due to Falcone’s wild bet on broadband firm LightSquared which has been built to bring high speed internet to nearly a quarter of a billion Americans. The deployment and activiation of the technology has been blocked by the federal government because of interference with GDS signals. Some experts believe that LightSquared will eventually collapse without ever having an active customer.

According to Bloomberg

“The decline was primarily due to a conservative adjustment in the fund’s holdings of LightSquared, to be consistent with the results of work done by the fund’s third- party valuation firm,” Lew Phelps, a spokesman for the New York-based fund, said in a statement. “The valuation takes into account uncertainty about the outcome of political issues related to alleged interference with the GPS system by LightSquared transmitters,” added Phelps, who confirmed the fund’s loss.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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