The headlines are relentless. Just today: UK Elections Imminent China Trade Deal (Again!) US Stock Markets Break Records (Again!) Greta as Time’s Person of the Year Mass Shooting Trump – Impeachement Trump – Horowitz Report on FISA / FBI Trump – Mean Tweets! China Bond Defaults The real question: Who cares? Most of the news…
Things we learned in business school 15-20 years ago: Porter’s 5 Forces: Threats of competitors, new entrants, suppliers, customers & substitutes should drive business strategy. BCG Matrix: Market growth rate and Market share should drive corporate prioritization between business lines. Marketing’s 4 P’s: Product, price, placement & promotion should drive marketing strategy NPV, ROI &…
You probably own traditional funds, whether ETF’s, LPs, or simple mutual funds. You might even own a “digital asset” fund investing in cryptocurrencies and utility tokens. I bet you do NOT own a digital shares of traditional asset fund. The legal issues are tricky, and the first digitized funds are just hitting the market now.…
It has been a year of massive change for Hong Kong. As we look ahead to 2020, take a moment to reflect on where we are: What do we love about this city? Why do we choose to base our lives here? The perspective below is BY and FOR expats with poor Chinese language skills.…
Relaunching this URL as my personal website. It’s time. It used to be for my previous consulting firm. When I joined Loopnest as full time COO, I put up a “splash page” to hide the consultancy’s content. I just had my 1 year anniversary with Loopnest. We are doing great things. Very proud. We’ve been…
Brave leaders take risks that can make or break their organizations. Stupid ones just break stuff. Venn and Why Bravery is about taking action in spite of risk, facing potential consequences while pursuing a worthy objective. Stupidity is basically the same thing minus the worthy goal. The two overlap where the risk/reward is foolhardy. Corporate…
Your startup needs to do EVERYTHING: Raise money, build a team, develop a product/service, sell to customers, build the admin infrastructure to support it all… It’s hard to prioritize. It’s even hard to make a semi-complete “to do list”. That’s why I created this horrible acronym: ASAP EFF PP The letters make more sense in…
My dad did tax returns by hand. No computers, no electronic calculators. Carbon paper was the big time-saving tech innovation at CPA firms of the early 1960’s. Then computers came along. Tax preparation became much… Harder. Yes, auto-calculation made the basic math easier. But the era of basic math was over. Complexity exploded. Soon, it…
I don’t share too many details about my specific projects or responsibilities. People are curious. “Exactly what can you do?” The answer: A lot more than you expect. Good dog, Bailey. Good dog.
Deep Water Management Limited formally launched its Hong Kong business in April 2016. The plan was to help hedge funds & small finance firms compete with the big players: Innovation, new products, process improvement, reg compliance, internal controls… But Mike Tyson warned me, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” My…