Earlier this week, TD Canada Trust chairman Ed Clark warned Canadians against complacency: we may have dodged the first bullets, but there are more to come. Among the reasons he cited were that, with the drying up of securitization markets, banks would have to keep more loans on their books. Also, as foreign banks mend […]
Money market funds have been one of the great success stories of cash management. Started in the early 1970s as a way to earn higher interest rates than regulated bank deposits in the U.S., they brought in burgeoning assets from conservative investors and eventually from corporate treasurers looking to get a yield. But the Great […]
This week: a little bit of humour mixed with the logic of quantitative easing. Cover effect Investment contrarians have long been intrigued by what goes on a magazine cover. Business Week’s Death of Equities cover in 1979 is one example, although it took another three years for a bull market to begin. Similarly, in the […]
Online investment information used to be considered the domain of pennystock hustlers, boiler-room hacks and other assorted ne’er-do-wells. They walked the thinnest of lines separating honest appraisal of a rising stock from self-regarding hype for the benefit of insiders. Indeed, during the Internet bust, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission prosecuted a teenager for a […]
At a time when correlations are going to one and every asset category has suffered declines, some see alternative investments – in hedge funds, private equity, real estate – as viable still, but, more than ever requiring careful, educated analysis. Advisor Group reporters recently talked to Craig Asche, executive director of the six-year-old Chartered Alternative […]
Sometimes it takes a crisis to capture just how much things have changed. A few years ago, most blogs were highly personal, often very political, takes on the world. Many were written by well-known journalists; many more were written by anonymous axe-grinders. But as the financial crisis has accelerated, so has the proliferation of financial […]
By most accounts, the current financial crisis is epochal — the worst since the Depression. Still, it is a truism in asset management: look after the downside and the returns will look after themselves. But how well do asset managers look after the downside? In the current market meltdown, evidence of failure isn’t hard to […]
Canadian equities have proven no place to hide during the financial storm, and that applies to firms operating in private markets too: venture capital, mezzanine financing and leveraged buyouts. And that storm whips up winds in all directions. Fundraising has dwindled as traditional private equity investors find themselves overextended. The general partnerships that invest the […]
Canadians shouldn’t be too quick to think of an early end to the present downturn, says Canadian bond rating agency DBRS. It’s only just begun. “We don’t want to be alarmist, but we do want to highlight why we think this is a very serious recession,” says DBRS co-president Peter Bethlenfalvy. “We’re a small open […]
There seem to be cycles in private company investing. Those with long memories will remember Michael Milken and junk bonds. In recent memory, there were the venture firms of the Silicon Valley that went bust at the beginning of the decade, or more recently still, buyouts whose coda was supplied by the failure of the […]