Sumitomo

"The latest reason for Michelin’s stagnation: the arrival of the Japanese. In this field too, as in the automobile industry, Japanese manufacturers have come to shake things up. For the moment, Bridgestone, Yokohama, Sumitomo, and other Toyo brands represent barely more than two to three percent of the entire American market. But the percentage is misleading. Nearly twenty-two percent of the cars sold in 1981 in the United States were Japanese and equipped with Japanese tires. With technology that has made fantastic leaps in a few years, Japanese manufacturers have concentrated their efforts on certain regions of the United States and on high-end tires. Notably in the heavy-duty segment (where they make up about ten percent of the second-hand market)."

"Robertson and his team were attracted to copper because their research told them that the price of the metal was too high. While their research proved that the prices had to come down, they did not know when this would happen. They just knew it would happen at some point. The folks at Tiger liked the cop- per story, it offered them an opportunity to go short a market that they knew was overpriced and was destined to correct itself like a markets eventually do. However, what they did not know was that something was amiss in the copper market. They did not know of Sumitomo's problem and that the large Japanese conglomerate's trader was artificially propping up the price of the metal."