Investments – Susan Baird Law

Sage Shervin Pishevar’s Storm of Tweets about 2018’s U.S. Economy

Shervin Pishevar is a venture capitalist who helped launched major brands, and he co-founded Virgin’s Hyperloop. On February 5, the investor in Uber, Airbnb and Postmates shared his thoughts about the state of the U.S. economy through his Twitter account, @Shervin.

6,000 Points

Pishevar’s first tweet was inspired by early-February hiccups in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. He forecast an extensive, slow downturn. “I expect a 6000-point drop in aggregate in the months ahead,” he stated. Over the next 21 hours, Shervin Pishevar added related tweets under his first and built a 50-tweet thread.

Volatile Financial Instruments

Pishevar was concerned by the American stock market’s volatility indices. He called them the tail wagging the dog, and he wrote that these financial instruments can lead to the type of risky investing that allowed 2008’s Great Recession. Further, he decried exchange-traded funds.

Popularly known as ETFs, these tools enable less-savvy investors to buy one stock managed by a Wall Street veteran who spreads the fund’s pool across a diverse set of industries. Shervin Pishevar is not a fan of ETFs. “24 ETFs with a combined market cap of nearly $6 billion. The inverse ETFs are over $3 billion of that and are at essentially zero overnight,” he lamented.

Entrepreneurs without Borders

Continuing, the venture capitalist criticized the U.S.’s faith in its tech-field competitive advantage. He tweeted, “As I’ve said before, Silicon Valley is no longer a physical place but an idea that’s gone viral. Entrepreneurship is a movement. Borderless!”

1,500 Builders

Pishewar then showed how the U.S. trails China in the tech economy. He shared a story from SCMP News about a large train station built in Longyan by 1,500 workers in nine hours. “Meanwhile,” he tweeted, “our infrastructure is in tatters.” See This Page for more information

The Coming Shift

Further, Shervin Pishevar forecast a once-in-ten-centuries shift that cryptocurrencies could bring. “That shift has to do with a revolution in stateless digital currencies unleashed across the globe over the next couple decades,” he stated.

Nations prepared for that revolution have a chance at success in this century. The unprepared ones could fade from the global economic stage.

Sahm Adrangi Targets New Drug in Short Sale

Hedge fund investor Sahm Adrangi‘s is what is known as an activist or value investor, but his activism didn’t start on the stock market. The Iranian born Adrangi, who moved to the United States at the age of 5, initially joined protest groups while attending Yale University from 1999 to 2003. He became disillusioned by their tactics and insistence that he support causes that he didn’t agree with and grew to become more conservative in his views and discovered new ways to “fight the man”. Initially wanting to be a journalist, he wrote and edited the Yale Daily News but ended his college career by earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics.

The activist investor who is the Chief Investment Officer and founder of Kerrisdale Capital Management LLC. has a passion and talent for bringing to light shady business practices and even outright fraud, and he makes a profit from it.

Sahm Adrangi has recently been making headlines with the short selling attacks Sahm Adrangi has been making on biotech companies that were developing drugs that he foresaw as doomed to failure based on the shoddy Phase I and II research results. The two drugs included the prostate cancer vaccine ProstVac that was being developed by Bavarian Nordic and Sage Therapeutic’s failed brexanolone designed to treat a type of epilepsy known as SRSE. He had predicted the failure of these drugs more than a year before the Phase III results were released, both showing no verifiable effect than a sugar pill but with more potential side effects.

Now Sahm Adrangi has a new drug in his crosshairs and investors are taking notice. This drug, which is still in research phases but already showing lackluster results, is known only as NEOD001 and is being developed to treat AL amyloidosis by the company Prothena. Sahm Adrangi insists that the results shown in initial testing could be produced from natural variances in the progression of the disease itself and the numbers are being skewed and misrepresented to mislead investors and hopeful patients and doctors. While nobody wants a medication to fail, bringing a useless one to market could have even deadlier side effects. Prothena’s stock dropped 8% after Adrangi made his research public. See This Page for related information.

Sahm Adrangi Initiates New Short Selling Attack on Prothena

Investor Sahm Adrangi is making another bet against another potentially shoddy drug, this time it’s Prothena’s NEOD001. Prothena’s drug, which is entering final testing, was designed to treat a bone marrow disorder that causes patients to produce antibodies that cannot be broken down, AL amyloidosis which can affect multiple body systems. The disease has no foreseeable cure and is currently treated with forms of chemotherapy. According to Sahm Adrangi’s research, the initial testing’s results were exaggerated to show success when in actuality it could be explained by random responses from the complicated disease.

After he went public with his research through various outlets, Prothena’s stock dropped by 8% with a further drop expected upon conclusion of Phase III testing. This comes right on the heels of 2 other drugs, Bavarian Nordic’s Prostvac and Sage Therapeutics brexanolone, being found essentially useless years after Sahm Adrangi predicted their failure in late-stage testing.

While betting against a potentially life-changing drug may seem strange at first, Adrangi maintains that these companies were aware of their ineffectivity well before final testing but continued to push them to draw investors. They did this by allegedly misrepresenting the findings and using too small of testing pools. Sahm Adrangi is known as an activist investor, a new type of investor that uses their own personal values to determine their actions on the stock market. Instead of investing into companies he deems worthwhile, he uses a technique known as short selling.

Short selling, or shorting, is when an investor borrows shares from a company they expect to fail while the price is high, selling immediately, and then rebuying them at a lower price and returning the company. This allows Sahm Adrangi to keep the difference and make a profit. While the technique is risky and looked down upon some, the hedge funder has taken down several dishonest and outright fraudulent multi-million-dollar companies. Read This Article for more information.

Sahm Adrangi is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Kerrisdale Capital Management LLC, a boutique investment firm in New York. The Iranian immigrant graduated from Yale University in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in Economics and a desire for change in the unfair trading policies of the stock market.

Understanding The Role Of Investment Banking In The Economy with Martin Lustgarten

Investment Banks play a vital role in stimulating the economy and moving capital. One of the major things investment banks do on a daily basis is to invest capital, whether is it their own money or a client’s money and use it to buy stock in a company, municipal bonds, federal bonds and even purchase companies outright.

The purchase of company stock helps companies that are issuing the stock obtain much needed capital that they need to expand or continue business operations. Bonds work in a similar way except that the issuer is a government entity such as a city or a country. Purchasing bonds gives much needed money to a government institution to complete projects such as building roads, repairing bridges or adding facilities such as schools or parks.

Investment banks also actually help companies issue the stock. They don’t just buy and sell stock themselves. For example an investment bank will be like an appraiser and determine how much the stock of a company is worth. The company hiring the investment bank for appraisal of its stock, could also task the investment bank with actually selling the stock to other investors. If this is the case the investment bank acts as a broker, which is something that investment banks frequently do. Investment banks are considered to be experts in determining the true value on the market of a newly issued company stock. Meanwhile, the buying and selling of stocks helps move equity across the markets.

Martin Lustgarten is one of the many investment bankers who has had a long and successful career in the field of investment banking. Mr. Lustgarten has his own investment banking company that he named after himself. The name of his firm is Lustgarten Martin and it is based in Florida. His company specializes in investment in Latin America, due to Martin Lustgarten’s strong grasp of the Latin American culture and Spanish language.

Now living in Ponte Vedra Beach near Jacksonville, Florida Martin Lustgarten is now focusing on spending most of his free time with his wife and kids when he is not working at Lustgarten Martin. He is the CEO there. Mr. Lustgarten is also an avid collector of unique and rare items with an eye for vintage watches.

More information about Lustgarten:

https://www.intelius.com/people/Martin-Lustgarten/0cf5sn6k7wa?hasSentRedir=1&refer=4918

https://www.crunchbase.com/person/martin-lustgarten#/entity