T Zia Compliance

A brief look back on 2024 and analysis of the moves within my chosen set of data. Decided to look at USA, European, Indian, emerging markets and Japanese equities, compared to Brent spot Oil, spot Gold, USD/GBP and USD/BTC, with the clear winner being Bitcoin, whose run may of run out of steam for the moment, but given the support it now has from a wider political establishment and having broken highs past 100k, can't really feel negative about it going into the future. The mining of Bitcoins becomes slower as will the supply, but not the demand. Bitcoin has matured a lot over the past 10 years and now has become a constituent of series money portfolios. Credit where credit is due is my saying. It remains to be seen what Bitcoin will achieve in 2025 or what the Nasdaq 100 will do with the top heavy index as it is now known as. We wait and see. My blog is not to guess or try to be smart, so few people get anything right in predicting financial markets especially those liquid public ...

The aim of this entry is on the world of private equity and what do they really offer their LP's (their fund investors) and are they just sucked into the hype and sales pitches of the PE industry and what are the real social consequences of a business taken over by a PE firm via their fund or fund structure. My aim is for people to focus on what the two videos say and the charts as I am a person who likes to illustrate investment comparisons and returns rather than write on a topic with only a short amount of paragraphs which won't be able to go into detail enough. So please watch the two videos with links: Why Private Equity SUCKS for (almost) Everyone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o10nh86q64 Warren Buffett: Private Equity Firms Are Typically Very Dishonest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3_41Whvr1I 1 year performance chart for USA listed private equity/so-called alternative investment management firms - Ares, Apollo, TPG, KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle, Blue Owl and S&P 500....

The chart below illustrates the dominance of the Nasdaq Computer and Internet Sector Indexes and their representative constituents have outperformed the broader Nasdaq 100 and the broadest market Nasdaq Composite since the beginning of 2000. I have also added the Banks, Insurance and Biotechnology Indexes as a comparison as well.  

On YouTube there is a fairly recent documentary on the DW Documentary channel, called Gambled away in the financial crisis - The Deutsche Bank story. Many of these documentaries never, unfortunately, go into the real details of the types of people who gain roles and climb up the corporate ladder, which is the cause of so many disasters, those who are narcissists, psychopaths, or sociopaths, many of whom have these characteristics, but also why so many of these firms have so-called compliance officers, risk managers and internal auditors and yet none of these who can be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds, dollars or euros seem not to do anything let alone the oversight of financial regulators. But this is a topic for another day. Greed surpasses everything in the corporate world, as does the lust for that power and acceptance by your so-called peer group.  But the reason I have written this piece is that my focus is mainly on price movements of securities and I want to show an ...

This is a simple overview of the top 5 mining related listed companies, especially relevant given recent takeover talk for Anglo American Plc by Australian listed BHP Group Limited. The below chart is from week beginning May 2010 so approximately 14 years and covers the period where many mining groups hit issues around debt levels and repayments. Like so many of my comparisons I have compared this period to the FTSE 100 and S&P 500. Please note this is a percentage comparison chart, does not take into consideration an individual base currency or any returns if dividends were reinvested.  This time the chart is for the past year and again, does not take into consideration any dividend reinvested and and any currency conversions into an investor base currency. What is interesting here is that both PRC companies have done best for this period.

Whilst the headline in the FT.com states the FTSE 100 closes at record high as Sterling weakens (close 8023.9, eclipsing the previous closing high of 8014.3 it hit in February last year), The main large cap UK listed equity index has still failed to match the YTD performance of the S&P 500, but on a longer 3 and 5 years performance has been very poor. It will take a lot more than the weakening of Sterling to match the S&P 500 or longer term performance of the Nasdaq 100 over the long term. YTD chart for GBP/USD. 20 year chart for GBP/USD.