Here’s a story about the top of the oil bubble. We were hosting our energy conference in Miami May 2008 with oil at $140/bbl and rising in a four year bull run, with oils crushing the market. I was standing at the bar in the evening speaking to Valero CEO Bill Klesse...

...when the lounge band singer – a lady in the style of Roberta Flack – started yelling “Security! Security! Security!” into the mike.

Looking across the bar, I could see there was a fight. Then I could see that it was adjacent to our E&P analyst Shannon Nome, a statuesque Texan blonde, so there was an issue for me directly; my colleague was stepping back on high heels in shock from a major kerfuffle.

Then I could see that two of our clients were fighting, and one staggered away from the other clutching his bleeding face saying “he eye-gouged me!”

Being as we were in a Miami Beach Hotel, one that hosted a week before a “Rap Weekend”, the security was there almost instantly.

Everything was broken up and we had to get the instigator thrown out of the conference, hotel, call the partner of his hedge fund to suggest he be fired, which I did in a late night call. Essentially one client had attacked the other during evening drinks at the bar. Unacceptable

The argument? It was over the then-cult natgas stock, EQT.

Here’s the punchline. They were both bullish.

But Boston long only was not bullish enough for drunk NY Hedge fund guy, and it turns out, at first drunk HF guy was pushing cash into Boston’s top pocket, saying “you don’t know how to run money, here I will give you money” as Boston was nothing like bullish enough on EQT.

It then exploded into a full-scale attack including the attempted eye gouge (which fortunately ended as a superficial face scratch).

With EQT stock then rising $40/share in May 2008, it would be under $20/share by September as oil & gas markets collapsed, actually the first major collapse of the Global Financial Crisis.

He never worked again on Wall Street, that guy, as such.

You can say he got out at the top, however ignominiously.

It was a four year bull run. They all end eventually, right when everyone is bullish at the top.