Business

We are unapologetically at the high-risk, low-return sweet-spot of agricultural finance. We choose to address geographies and sectors where there are real market failures or at least deep market imperfections.

Unknown.

I've been doing this a long time and have very rarely seen a company with sustainable competitive advantage like Amazon has.

People play Farmville, they don't play Zynga! In the same sense, people don't go to Paramount movies, they go to see Mission Impossible.

For the iPad it's game over in terms of market-share… Apple has won! It's a preposterously cheap stock…

I think Apple is preposterously undervalued. Apple has this mind-boggling margin structure, phenomenal consumer brand, and is accumulating mountains of cash. I joked on television that they should lever up and buy Greece! They have something like 7x cash-flow.

The principal problem with Groupon, in my opinion, is that they have a bad business model. It basically eats by selling their customers crack cocaine- telling them to cut their prices 50% for a selected number of people. If you do that enough? You wont have a business.

If you look historically at the historical contours of wealth- it's primarily created through private ownership. That's always been the case- and I believe it always be.

These individuals are looking for a global liquid multi-asset portfolio that is highly correlated around risk management strategies. They don't want you taking risk! they're going to do that.. and they can do it better than you can because they're now worth hundreds of millions or billions!

In all the politics that's going on… everyone says that small business are the driver for growth. The truth is, it's not just small businesses… it's NEW businesses. They are the ones that consume the largest number of jobs in an economy and lead to economic growth.

The money didn't just drop-in… it arrived through creation and building! These individuals are always going to be about growth….

It's amusing when you ask people, well name someone who became rich as a hedge fund client?

Hedge funds give less transparency than almost anything that people invest money in... Since investors have accepted much less transparency and much less attractive terms in liquidity and information rights, they have not been able to pick apart the sources of return.

Small hedge funds do better than big ones... big hedge funds did better when they were small... therefore the industry did better when it was small... That third step in the logic is something that investors don't spend a lot of time thinking about because there's nobody around to point that out to them!

If all the money that's ever been invested in hedge funds had been put in treasury bills instead, the results would have been twice as good.

Since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year... never in the history of Finance was so much paid by so many for so little.

Think of 'branding' as burning in a name on an animal such as a cow so that the cow's owner would be known. This protects the owner in the event that the animal is stolen. But we can use the name 'branding' whenever anyone affixes their name to something that is available for sale.

Father of Modern Marketing & Prolific Management Author