Passive investment My new favourite account on Twitter is StripMallGuy. He buys and sells small shopping centres in New York. If you are interested in commercial property in particular, he is a must-follow. This particular tweet struck me because where do you find truly passive investments? People will tell you property is set and forget

Sunday looms The saga of ‘will they, won’t they’ for US bitcoin ETFs reaches its next major milestone this Sunday. Back in April, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest submitted their ETF application. We are now at the second Approve/Deny/Extend stage for the SEC. The situation is rather complicated by the SEC being in court against Grayscale

Everything’s a fine I assumed they were dead. Somehow though, the corpse of Credit Suisse managed to get fined by both the Bank of England (£87m) and the Federal Reserve ($269m) for their dealings with defunct hedge fund Archegos. Credit Suisse lost $5.1bn (£4bn) when the hedge fund defaulted in March 2021. It ultimately led

1984 A light start for you. We have a tendency to be histrionic about privacy and the State and all manner of things here. Presumably with that in mind I was sent an alternative view of the Orwell classic 1984. Reasonable to suggest that had Orwell included Def Leppard, the book’s reach would have been

Lowe Down As you rise through the ranks of the civil service (or anywhere really) it becomes less and less about talent and more and more about politics. In the case of Australian Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, his time has come. His contract coincides with a difficult economic situation, rising rates, rising prices and

Big enough to control “Instead of investing in gold as a hedge against inflation, a hedge against the onerous problems of any one country, or the devaluation of your currency whatever country you’re in – let’s be clear, bitcoin is an international asset, it’s not based on any one currency and so it can represent

Oops Towards the end of 2022 there was a particular shift in the sentiment towards this sector. Choke Point 2, as it became known, targeted the banking relationships of crypto businesses and ultimately took out Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank as well as a few others along the way. While that was intentional, the knock

Fink so Is it curious that in the week following the virtual take-down of Binance in the US, a flurry of major US operators submit ETF applications? First we had BlackRock, followed 48 hours later by Fidelity (Cathie Wood’s ARK re-submitted their original application last month).  In an environment so clearly hostile to the sector,

I’ll call him I’m reliably advised that it’s been a “terrible week for bitcoin”. I believe the contrary to be true. In the wash up of the SEC movement against Binance, Coinbase and others, several coins have been absolutely crushed having been specifically called out by the SEC as securities. In many cases there simply

Enforcement time Finally! The SEC brought its action against Binance, which has obviously been coming for a while. It immediately caused the BNB token to fall by 10% and the whole market fell on the news. The SEC went as far as posting this on their social media platforms, which might be considered somewhat prejudicial