Two months ago, Bloomberg's Patrick Clark penned an article that promptly went viral as it touched on a rather unorthodox topic: a pet leasing, or rather rental, company aimed at subprime borrowers who could not afford to buy their pet outright.
The company in question is Wags Lending, a/k/a Bristlecone, was founded by Dusty Wunderlich in 2003. A brief background from the original BBG piece:
We almost made it a full month without a prominent hedge fund shuttering - an eternity in an age when ETFs and passive vehicles soak up several billion in capital each day at the expense of "active" managers - and then Bloomberg spoiled the streak when moments ago it reported that John Burbank, one of the handful of investors who made a killing from shorting subprime, and head of the $2.4 billion Passport Capital is shutting down one of his core hedge funds, the latest in a string of closings hitting the industry.
Authored by Michael Lebowitz via 720Global.com,
Passive Negligence Part II
Literally no one knows the true 'value' of research, not even the investment banks that are selling it. Up until now, equity research has been treated as a 'freebie' given away to institutional clients in return for trading commissions but that is all about to change thanks to the European Union’s MiFID II regulations, which require asset managers to separate trading commissions from investment-research payments.
Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,
In what seems a lifetime ago, I was the equity index trader at a big bank on Bay Street. Although a lot has changed since then, there are parts of the game that are timeless. So I am putting my old hat back on to analyze VanEck’s recent problems arising from the success of their GDXJ ETF (Junior Gold Miners). And lest you think this will be a boring ETF specific piece, I urge you to suffer through the details as I believe the market is missing the bigger picture message.