For those that don’t know the origin of the title of this post, which I’m sure almost everyone has heard before, the phrase “something wicked this way comes” is originally from William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. More appropriate for purposes of this post is its role as the title of a Ray Bradbury novel penned in [...]
February 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Changes at the Margin – How to Prepare for a Disorderly Move
In a past life, while still in the clutches of the investment banking world, I’d made a few friends in the “trading fraternity” and visited them on a regular basis for work and social reasons. When it came to markets, opinions varied little within the group. Traders were unanimously bullish or bearish on any given [...]
February 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment
A Conversation with Harris Kupperman – Part Deux
We ended the last post (the first part of a discussion with Harris Kupperman – “Kuppy”) discussing Mongolia and then Cambodia. In this discussion Harris and I moved on to the state of the world economy, and Japan in particular. ——- Chris: We’re living in a very unique investing environment at present. Frankly when I [...]
February 7, 2013 By 3 Comments
Seeking Safety in the Frontier
Historically, Emerging and Frontier markets may have been associated with instability, volatility and a lack of certainty. However, today many emerging economies are actually less volatile than developed ones, enjoy SUBSTANTIALLY lower levels of debt and far better fiscal accounts. In fact, although Zimbabwe recently announced it had only $217 in the government checking account, [...]
December 18, 2012 By 9 Comments
Yak & Yen, Yin & Yang
Strong macro-economic trends are typically like ocean liners or overfed pigs in feed lots. They turn slowly and with difficulty. I recently discussed Mongolia, comparing it with another resource rich country in Africa in a post entitled Congolia. Therein I re-stated our bullish stance. The country has some very strong macro-economic tailwinds behind it. We [...]
