A case study for individual investors who can wait, but still need a defensible price, enforceable rights and a route to repayment. Distressed investing appeals to people who can look beyond a damaged reputation and wait for value to emerge. A failed company can leave cash, investments, receivables and legal claims worth recovering. An original […]
Author: serumbach
What BlackRock did, who retains the recovery rights, and how an individual investor should assess frozen securities. A security marked at zero can attract a patient investor for understandable reasons. The underlying business may still operate, institutions may prefer to remove an awkward position, and someone investing their own money may be able to wait […]
Creatine occupies an unusual position in the supplement market. It is inexpensive, naturally present in the human body and in ordinary foods, has been studied for decades, and has considerably stronger evidence for a specific benefit than most products sold beside it. Yet the same basic white powder is now marketed as a bodybuilding supplement, […]
From stock-market transactions and confidential information to preferential deals, private investments and market-moving decisions — how politicians, central bankers and public officials can gain financial advantages unavailable to ordinary investors. In June 2017, US Congressman Christopher Collins received confidential information that a biotechnology company in which he was a major shareholder had suffered a serious […]
The acquisition of Credit Suisse has made UBS easier to describe with superlatives, but considerably more difficult to understand through any single statistic. The combined institution is simultaneously Switzerland’s dominant universal bank, one of the world’s largest wealth managers, an important asset manager, a major corporate lender and service provider to the Swiss economy, and […]
A diversified portfolio can still depend on one legal and custody infrastructure. Here is how Swiss investors can think about that hidden concentration without building an unnecessarily complicated offshore structure. Modern investors have become very good at diversifying what they see. A single global ETF can provide exposure to thousands of companies across dozens of […]
From targeted technology restrictions to severe market fragmentation: the same Chinese company can carry very different risks depending on whether it is held as an ADR, Hong Kong share, A-share or ETF The obvious reaction to the Sberbank experience is to ask whether China could one day present the same problem. It is also the […]
Why valuation, diversification and a Swiss passport were not enough when sanctions, capital controls and financial plumbing collided Investors normally think about risk in terms of price. A company can earn less than expected, interest rates can rise, currencies can fall, competitors can improve, or an expensive share can simply become cheaper. Diversification exists largely […]
China spent decades being associated with generic medicines, active pharmaceutical ingredients and low-cost manufacturing. That description is now badly out of date. The more important development for investors is not that China can manufacture drugs cheaply. It is that Chinese companies are increasingly discovering drug candidates, taking them rapidly through early clinical trials and licensing them […]
For more than a decade, one of the easiest investment decisions was also one of the most profitable: own the United States, particularly its largest technology companies, and allow American exceptionalism to do the rest. The combination of deep capital markets, extraordinary companies, a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem and ultimately the artificial-intelligence boom made the US […]
