Tag: Japan

This Company’s Burn Rate Should Scare The Hell out of You!

Burn Rate: Investopedia – “The rate at which a new company uses up its venture capital to finance overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations. In other words, it’s a measure of negative cash flow.” Day in and day out I review businesses. Most are privately run businesses, some

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Pray Tell What Happens When…

Friedrich Von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was first published a full 68 years ago. Hayek argues convincingly that all forms of socialism and central economic planning ultimately lead to tyranny. Interestingly, he argues also that this tyranny will come to us from people of good intentions and not from the

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This is Who Will Save The World!

Japan has just shocked the market with…you guessed it, a widening trade deficit. We spilled a fair bit of digital ink explaining why the Japanese Government fiscal situation is a moth in search of a flame. Our complimentary report which you can download, print and doodle on anytime you please…(really we’ll take

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Japan – Like Zimbabwe?

I’m a big fan of buying bombed out sectors, but only where a catalyst to change the environment for the better is evident. Zimbabwe qualified a couple years ago, and still does. Japanese equities certainly qualify today as well. When I look at Japanese equities, the case can certainly be made

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