SHORT INTERESTS: TIPS, TRENDS, OBSERVATIONS

Gold is cold

Like the old gray mare, gold mines ain’t what they used to be. In fact, they’re a good way to lose your shirt, even if you thought you did the right thing.

Take Ashanti Goldfields mining group. It’s 20% state-owned and the biggest company in Ghana.

Poor Ashanti, like a lot of other producers,

figured that the price of gold was going to keep falling, so it shorted gold futures as a hedge. Then the price took off, leaving Ashanti holding a $270 million bag. The delightful banks that are counterparties decided they didn’t want the remnants of a gold mine right now, thank you, so they gave Ashanti three years to pay up. Ashanti may be off the canvas but it’s still on the ropes and the predators, led by Britain’s Lonmin, are circling.

Burr under the saddle

You’ve all heard the story about how one day in 1804, Alexander Hamilton told his staff at Bank of New York “I’m going over to Jersey for a little while. Don’t do anything till I get back.” And of course everybody waited 180 years or so before daring to move.

Well, things weren’t like that at the upstart Manhattan Co. That was the city’s water works and hauled in so much dough that its founder, one Aaron Burr, applied for a bank charter in 1799 to challenge the Hamilton posse. That wasn’t his only challenge to him, of course. Hamilton was buried in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street and became the patron saint of the $10 bill. Burr returned from their Jersey date under his own power, grabbed his hat and coat, and cleared out for parts west.

Now the Burr bunch’s successor has decided to remind everyone who was the best shot. Chase Manhattan Corp., which still uses as its logo a stylized version of the wooden water pipe insignia of the Bank of the Manhattan Corp., is celebrating its 200th anniversary this month with a private exhibit in its Park Avenue offices.

Centerpiece of the exhibit, reports sister publication Crain’s New York Business: replicas of the fatal dueling pistols.

Get ’em young

Hammacher Schlemmer, the New York specialist in selling stuff nobody needs, is pushing ATM machines for the business-savvy four-year-old. It works like one in what the catalog calls “an effort to teach children the responsibility and concept of money management by helping them to maintain a savings account of their own.”

It comes with a bank card that kids can use to withdraw their money; they can make deposits without the card.

Goal setting, which ranks No. 1 with the four-year-olds we know, comes with the push of a button, too. As if this wasn’t enough to induce kids to save their Cracker Jack money, it’s loaded with a four-function calculator, too.

How much will it cost to get your your little Abby Joseph Cohen on the investment track? Pony up $59.95, and you might not need your accountant any more.