NEW YORK (Fortune) -- So I love this Amaranth hedge fund blow up. What kind of risk management do they have when one trader up in Canada can put half the firm's capital at risk over some energy trades? Also: When you see the price of anything on Wall Street, moving up or down dramatically over say, six weeks, some hedge fund manager somewhere is getting his asp (an Egyptian snake) handed to him.

THAI MARKET: So the coup sent U.S. markets lower as well as the Thai currency, the baht. The Thai stock market was closed by the Coupsters. Should be open again soon. From everything we hear the coup there has significant support from the populace which was discontent with the former Thai leader who was overthrown. Ergo, various Thai securities that trade here ... which tanked yesterday ... may be ripe for a comeback Take the Thai Fund, (please.) Yesterday, it fell from around $9 to below $8.40, then later in the day back up to back above $8.60. TTF (Charts) had a huge 2003, but has been flat to down since. Could be back on track!!!.

YAHOO!: I hear that Yahoo! got particularly hit by a pullback in advertising by mortgage companies. As in "get your funky five year 0% interest only mortgage here! Don't worry you won't pay a cent until 2011, and by then rates will be even lower." Yeah right. They ain't selling those anymore. The other thing is that Yahoo (Charts) is competing against Google (Charts) on the one hand, AOL (Charts) and Mister Softie (Charts) on the other hand, and MySpace (Charts) and YouTube on the other hand. Hey that's three hands, which is sort of the point. Was with some 'hooians the other day, and they were moanin'. Stock has gone nowhere for two years. I think YHOO has become a mature, staid company. And it's rolling out a new ad campaign this week, where if you change Yahoo! to your homepage on Friday you get coupons to get a free cup of coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. Smacks of desperation, no?

ERICSSON: The Swedish telco giant may be in line to get a piece of the Department of Homeland Security's $2.5 billion contract to secure our borders. There was talk of awarding this business only to American companies, but the Big E has a patent for a network of sensors that is apparently an absolute must. Raytheon (Charts) and Boeing (Charts) may also bid on this part of the business, but they may be licensing the technology from E. But that's far from clear. Lockheed apparently has its own systems. Bloomberg reports that a spokesman from Northrup declined comment. Ericsson's ticker here in the US is ERIC (Charts), which works for me. Stock came back from the dead in '02. Has been flat for a while. Citi upgraded it this morning.

LOOSE CHANGE: Kudos to the New York Times for the H-P story. It is so outrageous and unbelievable! H-P executives discussed having investigators pose as clerical workers or cleaning people to infiltrate the San Francisco offices of the Wall Street Journal and CNET. Company has a manager of global investigations. CRAZY!!!....And, pray for Dog the Bounty Hunter.....Deep Blue sent this. Love it: http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/tours/slimming/index_f.html

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E-mail Andy Serwer at serwer@fortunemail.com

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