[SilasX]

Was LTCM really an example of "great idea, poorly run"? I don't think you can point to any particular management problem, but the core idea. The failure was basically:

"Hey, US government bonds have this bizarre, persistent price premium over equally reliable governments. So we can short the former to buy the latter."

... and then it turned out there was a very good reason for that premium: when people panic, they'll buy up US bonds, not Italian ones, which will destroy any short position, and be catastrophic if overleveraged.

I'm not sure what better management could have done about that, besides, "hey, don't bet the house on this".