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We are launching Friday Only Club!

Oscar de la Renta chose not to show at New York Fashion Week and instead streamed on Amazon. Is Amazon a suitable forum for a luxury brand? CEO Alex Bolen said, "I'm not sure. But we have to experiment with new ways to get our story out." https://lnkd.in/g4rZMxyb We launched our funds when Covid started and with the halt in travel and tough fund raising environment for emerging managers, we focused on performance and experimented with new ways to reach out to allocators, namely Linkedin posts and YouTube videos which can now be binge-watched on  www.quantflix.com . True, some people say that with the positive fund returns last year for both our long-only equity and multi-strategy funds, and the China fund outperforming its benchmark by its annualized double-digit aim, it was expected that we would pass the $100m mark. But when times are bad, most new investment monies went to well-known funds that are much bigger with a marketing budget that we cannot afford. So every lit
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Too Good to Be True

I opened a 1998 Bordeaux during Gao Cap Bar's* Friday Happy Hour and everyone round the table took a sip then paused.

"I think it's off."
"Maybe old wine is supposed to taste like this? My WSET class used 'mushroom' as a description."
"But it's more 'mouldy' than 'mushroom'."
"Have you eaten mould?"
"Fine. Whoever wants to continue drinking this bottle can do so."

Everyone poured away the wine from their glasses and even gave a quick wash with filtered water. We don't know what's wrong, but something feels off. Doesn't matter if it's a good year, or expensive bottle or from a famous region, we're staying away.

Netflix is showing a docuseries on Bernie Madoff. Some people might say, "oh it was obvious, Madoff was not that smart to come up with some quant algo that beat everyone else", or "we back-tested the split-strike conversion strategy he claimed and couldn't get to anything close to the returns he claimed". But what if a MIT professor, associate dean at this prestigious university (where SBF also went to), was the portfolio manager and not BM with a political science degree from Hofstra?

Gabriel Bitran and his son Marco, with a Harvard Business School degree, were found guilty of defrauding investors of 500M pretending they had some proprietary super-duper quant algo with no down years:
https://lnkd.in/gA2FuH9J

Turns out there was no algo. Bitran put the money in not just Madoff's fund, but also with ANOTHER Ponzi guy, Tom Petters. Being good at studying (or teaching) doesn't mean people can manage money:
https://lnkd.in/ggNnxktR

Hey at I least I told my fellow investors the fund was "too good to be true or a Ponzi". Don't be afraid to walk away.

*Due to inflation and perhaps to a lesser extent the desire to hang out with me, Gao Cap Bar has had a successful pilot and we will be re-launching "Hi-Five at GCB". Join us on Fridays from 5pm. Reservations required.

#bordeauxwine #hedgefund #madoff #ponzi








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