Investors seek wine, art funds for hedging

Rising fears that traditional investing has become a lose-lose proposition have a growing number of wealthy folks seeing dollar signs in niche funds that invest in art, wine, musical instruments and even classic cars, the New York Post reports. They’re known as “collectible” funds or “treasure” funds, and while they come with plenty of skeptics and potential pitfalls, they’re also promising returns reminiscent of the days before the Great Recession.

Sergio Esposito, founder of Union Square’s wine shop Italian Wine Merchants, said the wine fund he helped start in 2010, The Bottled Asset Fund, has been doing so well he hopes to launch another next year.  After selling its first batches of wine this year, the $8.2 million fund is now seeing profits upward of 30 percent, he said.  Try getting that out of the S&P 500 or even smart-money hedge funds.

It’s not just wine funds that are promising mouthwatering returns….Last year, a group that included Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, kicked off a fundraising campaign for a vehicle that would invest in classic cars. The goal for the fund, which has yet to launch: annual returns of 15 percent a year, according to Bloomberg…..

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/vintage_returns_M3VjPkRiMdc8S0BY37Wp7I#ixzz225LnaZ8p

This Week Is Going To Be Massive For The Global Economy

Gird your loins, fasten your seatbelt...According to BusinessInsider after a wildly volatile week in the markets last week, which saw huge gains on Thursday and Friday, the coming week promises to be a massive one for the entire global economy.

That's because there's going to be tons of economic data, and potential action from the world's most important central banks.

Tomorrow, Monday, is actually pretty quiet, but starting Tuesday it will be non-stop action all the way through Friday.

In the US on Tuesday are several important numbers: Personal Income, Consumer Sentiment, Chicago PMI, and the Case-Shiller home price report. Case-Shiller should be particularly interesting, given the growing belief that home prices are in the process of bottoming.

Then on Tuesday night we get the start of the monthly ritual of PMI day: When all the big economies around the world have their latest PMI readings unveiled on the first of the month. China and South Korea will kick things off, but the numbers will go all night, through Europe, and then of course into the US, when the ISM will be released at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday…..

Read about the rest at : http://www.businessinsider.com/preview-of-the-week-beginning-july-30-2012-7

Meet The Bond Market’s $100 Million Leading Man

Recessions, crackups, bailouts — according to the NY Times these are profitable times for Mohamed A. El-Erian.  Mr. El-Erian is the crown prince of the multitrillion-dollar global bond market, the figurative heir of its long-reigning king, William H. Gross of the mighty Pacific Investment Management Company, known as Pimco….

Mr. Gross is the maestro behind the biggest of all, the $263 billion Pimco Total Return fund. But as the financial world has come unhinged — first in 2008, with the subprime fiascoes in the United States, and now in Europe, where the debt crisis flared anew last week — Mr. El-Erian has come into his own, stepping out of the long shadow of Mr. Gross, one of Pimco’s founders and his former boss.

On many mornings, you can spot Mr. El-Erian, who is also Pimco’s chief executive, on CNBC, BBC or Bloomberg, or somewhere in the financial pages, expounding on the financial crisis of the day…. Indeed, even by the standards of Wall Street, where many financial types pull down eye-popping paychecks, Mr. El-Erian and Mr. Gross make gobs of money. Mr. El-Erian, 53, was paid about $100 million last year, according to a person with knowledge of Pimco’s finances who spoke on condition of anonymity because the firm, a unit of Allianz, the big German financial company, doesn’t disclose compensation…

Nice work if you can get it, no?  Find out more at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/business/mohamed-el-erian-is-the-bond-markets-new-leading-man.html?_r=1

Apple Bigs considering an investment in Twitter

Apple officials have talked with Twitter recently about potentially investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the social media site, The New York Times reports.

Such a move could make Twitter, which was valued at $8.4 billion last year, worth more than $10 billion, several unnamed sources told the paper.

Apple, which has incorporated Twitter into some of its products, has done little in the social media realm. The investment could help the company better understand how social media works and better integrate Twitter into some of its products…..

More?  Go to http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/07/report-apple-officials-considering-an-investment-in-twitter/1#.UBQQrrT2bhc

J.P. Morgan Hits Executive Reset Button

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. shook up its top management, elevating two executives who mopped up the "London whale" trading mess and stripping power from the bank's top finance officer and investment-bank boss, the WSJ reports.

The moves on Friday constitute the third major J.P. Morgan executive suite reshuffling in little more than a year, narrowing the field of potential successors to 56-year-old Chief Executive James Dimon. Mr. Dimon is expected to stay in his role for several more years, and board members want to see how younger executives perform in larger roles as they assess their potential for future leadership of the ...

More?  Check out http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443343704577552731867264356.html?mod=WSJ_business_LeftSecondHighlights

SEC Accuses Billionaire's Firm Of Insider Trading

From Forbes: A trading firm controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Zhang Zhirong reaped more millions in illegal profits by trading on inside information about the biggest energy deal in recent memory, U.S. regulators say.

In a complaint released Friday, the SEC alleges Well Advantage Limited and other unknown traders in Hong Kong and Singapore stockpiled shares of Canadian energy concern Nexen in the days before Chinese firm CNOOC announced a $15.1 billion acquisition of the company July 23.

The SEC froze the assets’ of the traders in question after Well Advantage moved to liquidate its entire position in Nexen after shares leaped on news of the CNOOC takeover. Zhang Zhi Rhong, the SEC’s Enforcement Division says controls another company that has a strategic agreement with CNOOC.

“Well Advantage and these other traders engaged in an all-too-familiar pattern of misusing inside information to place extremely timely trades and profit handsomely from their illegal acts,” said the SEC’s Sanjay Wadhwa…

Wait...wait...there's more at http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2012/07/27/sec-hong-kong-billionaires-trading-firm-used-inside-info-to-profit-on-cnooc-nexen-deal/

Deep Thoughts: Is America Over? Mayberry R.I.P.and The Declinist panic.

Andy Griffith was a genial and gifted character actor, but when he died on Independence Day eve, you’d have thought we’d lost a Founding Father, not a television star whose last long-running series, the vanilla legal drama Matlock, expired in 1995, New York Magazine’s Frank Rich writes.  The public tributes to Griffith were over-the-top in a way his acting never was, spreading treacle from the evening newscasts to the front page of the New York Times.

It was as if the nation were mourning its own demise. To commentators in the liberal media, Griffith’s signature television role, Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina, was “one of the last links to another, simpler time” (the Miami Herald) and a repository of “values which actually transcended the deep divides which tore the nation apart during the years the show aired from 1960 to 1968” (the Washington Post). On the right, the sermonizers quickly moved past an inconvenient fact (Griffith made a spot endorsing Obamacare in 2010) to deify Sheriff Taylor for embodying “a time when television was cleaner and simpler” and for giving “millions of Americans the feeling the country stood for all the right things” (National Review). Among those “right” things was the fictional Mayberry’s form of governance, which, in the ideological take of the Daily Caller, demonstrated that “common sense and local control work better than bureaucracy or top-down management.”

In reality, The Andy Griffith Show didn’t transcend the deep divides of its time. It merely ignored them… The wave of nostalgia for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960…..

Read more at http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/declining-america-2012-7/