I really don't know what the issue regarding all the crazy L2 displays is all about. A lot of systems are screwed up right now due to power outages from the hurricane so maybe it is from that.
When I worked in the hedge fund industry, there was at one point a peak of around 10000 known hedge fund vehicles. There were the big ones that would make the news, but the vast majority were small operations with less than 100 million bucks and a big chunk of them under 25 million.
Most hedge funds were in long/short equity, which is the plain vanilla long the movers and short the weak stocks or just long the strong stocks with some some downside protection via shorts or puts. The next biggest segment was the Commodity Trading Advisor, which is futures, options, etc., and largely computerized or systems based.
A very small segment of the hedge fund world did penny stocks, mainly because there's very little scalability in such a strategy and also because it was considered a bit low rent. The biggest players in the penny stock world tended to be financing firms like Yorkville Advisors and NIR Group. They offered small companies convertible debt and would have puts on the equity "for downside protection". Even though these kind of firms could get kind of big, hundreds of millions in AUM, they were still kind of sketchy and not what the typical Ivy Leaguer hedge fund manager would want to work in.
Then, there were a bunch of 1 man or 2 man shops running a couple of million to 20 million tops in penny stock land. I remember visiting these kind of guys in New Jersey or out on Long Island over the years. They could make pretty decent money but their edge really came from being the big fish in the small pond.
I have seen so many hedge funds, big and definitely small, absolutely blow up over the years that I'm fairly certain that this is shaping up to be nuclear bomb for somebody's portfolio. Rarely do people just arbitrarily blow up out of the blue, it is usually because the guy was too cocky for his own good and kept doubling down hoping for a reversal until the position got too big and wiped him out.
JP Morgan just made that mistake earlier this year and lost a couple of billion trying to hedge an illiquid momentum play, so a sub 10 million dollar hedge fund trying to naked short TECO into the ground and ending up getting squeezed is real possibility.
