Jerome Bitun

*Warning, this is a long newsletter, but will be quite informative if you have the patience to read it.* I'm sure that by now, you've heard what has been happening to the market. Both the Dow Jones and S&P/TSX index dropped more than 500 points Monday due to Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy. In short, it was a slaughter. But is it really? Let me give you a background of what happened before I go into the details on how your investments may be affected. Let's start with Lehman Brothers. Lehman Brothers is one of the largest investment banks in the US if not the world. I was established in 1850, it is an innovator in global finance and serves the financial needs of corporations, governments, municipalities, institutional clients and high net worth individuals worldwide. It does financing, asset management, investment management, fixed income sales, trading and research. So what went wrong? Well, the best way I can explain it is this, it innovated itself in to a hole.