Hedge Fund Billionaire Rode the Worst Trade of His Life All the Way Down

(Bloomberg) -- Bit by bit, the smart money deserted Edward Lampert.

Michael Dell, David Geffen, George Soros, the Ziff brothers -- by 2012, all of them, and many more, had peeled away.

Not even Lampert’s friends could understand why the hedge-fund manager, once hailed as a young Warren Buffett, clung to his spectacularly bad investment in Sears, a dying department store chain...