Post -Apocalyptic Investing By Richard Marin, Managing Director of SEDA Experts, LLC During my forty-year Wall Street career I went through some pretty serious crises. At a relatively young age (34), I once sat in the anteroom of the ornate office of the Minister of Finance of Venezuela on a warm and humid Caracas afternoon. I was with our Vice Chairman, Carl Mueller, who was a wizened veteran of the Street. Carl had been the…
Not Invented Here I am constantly thinking about how to insure that I keep a diversified base of topics for my stories and not write too many posts about either Donald Trump and his insufferable politics and, for the moment, the Coronavirus. I think we are getting near overload on both those two topics. What I have learned is that everybody loves a good story and spinning a good story is what I like to…
Sent Home I’ve always been intrigued by Burning Man. I have never gone nor do I ever expect to go, but I am nonetheless fascinated by the annual gathering. I’m not sure I ever really bothered to understand what Burning Man is all about, other than walking around the desert naked and getting a sunburn. So I looked it up and it seems there are ten guiding principles: • Radical inclusion – all are welcome…
On Golden Pond Flying to New York for my first visit since moving to my own Golden Pond on our hilltop. I started at the airport and then for the first three hours of this flight (while pretending to sleep for a few hours) to listen to an audiobook which I just downloaded. It’s called Dark Towers and its about the rise and imminent fall of Deutsche Bank, including its strange and tangled relationship with…
Traveling to Freedom On Sunday I am taking my first trip since moving to San Diego. I’m flying to New York, where I will work and see my kids, and then I am flying to London for other work and will transit back through New York to be home after what is, in total about eight days. Big deal. I’ve done similar trips about a thousand times (literally 1,000 times over my adult life/career). I…
Handy Brad Now that we’ve moved in and mostly gotten our stuff placed and staged and generally winnowed down to manageable proportions, there are several small projects that need doing that seem either a bit beyond our capabilities and that we don’t want to bother brother-in-law Jeff to do. I would never undertake anything electronic in the house without first consulting Jeff, but I think it’s safe to say that he is perfectly content…
Beauty and the Beast When I wake up now, my routine after my most basic ablutions is to go into my study (conveniently located off our master suite) and check on the state of my world. I start by understanding how much sleep I have gotten. My CPAP machine nicely records that, and while I like to get seven hours, I’m satisfied with anything over six (I have yet to go much over eight and…
Outvoting Is it just me or is everyone more attentive to the primaries this year? Have I just awoken to this process this year where everyone else has been on this game while I was distracted with work or whatever? It’s not as though I haven’t voted before. I started with a vote for George McGovern in 1972 (I was just eighteen) and the rest is history. It was a miserable loss in both the…
Benny & Joon Today is a funny day of windows and doors. I woke up at 4am to check on a final report filing for a London expert witness assignment I have been working on. It needed to be filed by 5pm London time with the court and we had worked on it for a month with a particularly intensive last ten days and a very high pressure last 72 hours since we were given…
Self-Insuring During my career on Wall Street, I had occasion to become an expert of hedging and insurance. Let’s be clear about what I mean by an expert. I founded and ran our futures and options subsidiary thirty-five years ago when hardly anyone understood futures and options and very few in the financial world other than traders and commodities people even understood what hedging really was all about. This was the precursor to the derivatives…