I recall my first night in Vietnam, sipping a large whisky on the terrace of a hotel which had seen better times. A relic of French Colonial rule and now the only hotel in Saigon with a barman. It was September 1974. The few journalists that remained in the city and a handful of off-duty […]
As the fall and contagion from the recent failure of the crypto exchange FTX and its associated hedge fund Alameda Research reverberates around Wall Street and the Crypto markets, I feel it would be helpful to reassure our clients of how we hold crypto in our investment strategy. Most of the damage has been done […]
The financial market system is the key to the process of investing and raising capital to fund economic growth. Active liquid markets are necessary to provide investors with future cash flows in return for their capital. These allow investors to realise the present value of a future stream of income. However, are we now increasingly […]
Hyman Minsky, an economist in the early 1900s, like many others of his era, has largely been ignored and forgotten by the modern school of economic and monetary theory. Minsky largely dedicated his career to his “financial instability thesis” in which he predicted a form of corporatism where vast profits are privatised and vast losses […]
“Inflation is taxation without legislation” Milton Freidman The view of economists and investors of inflation is split. There is the camp that believes it will continue to rise and be sustained for the immediate future and beyond; and those who believe tightening of money through interest rate hikes by central banks, a recession and other […]
As stock market prices have sharply declined this year, many investors have sold into a declining market. Many live in an extreme state of anxiety while prices continue to fall further and their pension plans and investments post losses at a time when the cost of living has increased and the policy of central banks […]
We must understand what’s the best for us, not for anyone else Written in 1750 by Adam Smith, whom many consider to be the father of economics, these wise words speak to our appetite for risk and our human propensity for making emotion-driven behavioural errors. To be a truly successful investor the central challenge is […]
Concentrating our allocation of capital on a few names or big ideas makes us feel like geniuses when prices are rising – and fools when prices fall sharply and keep on falling
While gold has been sound money for thousands of years, Bitcoin does not yet have this pedigree and is hitherto untried and untested in a real financial crisis.
…skim milk masquerades as cream’ When investing in tradable securities, we sit across the table from the financial alchemists of Wall Street and the City of London. Unlike shares in companies, bonds are mostly bought and sold over the counter (OTC) and are not subject to the same scrutiny as the common or preferred stock […]
