Fans of natural justice may have been cheered this week by a hedge fund performance snapshot from Lipper confirming that managers specialising in shorting have been suffering. Last year’s panto villains are this year’s charity cases, underperforming a dozen other strategies by a whopping 32 per cent in the first 10 months.

A little sympathy is merited. Some “temporary” short-selling bans imposed in the autumn of 2008 are still in place; others have only recently been lifted, even in enlightened jurisdictions such as Norway and the Netherlands.