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Tuesday 7 April 2015

The Second Coming: No Smoke Without Fire (NSWF)



The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats, (1865-1939) The Second Coming


In deliberated and procrastinated fashion FPM are implementing "©NSWF:Reputation", as a patented coinage of financial and corporate vocabulary; of assigning historical reputations to conduct. NSWF stands for “No Smoke Without Fire” principle of an entitiy’s reputation and source of that having some definitive to tenuous truth. And since libel laws exist, our reputation rating of entities derives partly from mosaic research of past wrong-doings and relationships. The enterprise emphasis is investigative truth-telling and setting records straight by shamefully and disgracefully highlighting rogues or perpetrators in financial industry larceny. This reputation-mongering is aligned with FPM’s “Convergence” and “M&A Alternative Kind” enterprises. 

One’s future status is somewhat dependent on our past and present ones. FPM independence and lack of conflict of interest permits pronouncements of financial miscreants. Whereas other sources, such as brokerage research or industry adherents like mainstream media, maybe reluctant to spite the hand that feeds them. In less measure as well, FPM will be signalling singled-out flagships and heroes of progressive good and fair professional financial conduct. This last propriety of financial conduct is our standard expectation of professionals and operations, therefore of less concern for us.

We irrevocably taint the 'bad people and their actions', which is too often dismissed or buried as media strategy in publications terms like conspiracies or in judiciary terms "acquitted". We commercially investigate indeed if there is a source of “fire to the smoke”. Partnering new-advent media ("NAM") as opposed to main-stream media MSM, FPM propounds reputation for “wrong-doings”. This financial truth-telling or revelations, as purveyed by such examplars as  NakedCapitalism, ZeroHedge PensionPulse, ValueWalk etc are our collaborative heroes. For example, ex-pension guardian turned blogosphere pension-angel, Leo Kovalis. That's not a P.R. push message to be a sychophantic reach-out! We kowtow to the leaders and betters in this field of capital markets enterprise, which inspired the FPM ©NSWF:Reputation. Hattip! as the jargon goes. 

April is the second anniversary of “No Smoke Without Fire”, initially a blog exposition. See here.  Then FPM principals echoed “What To Do!” disaffection or disillusionment about the pernicious status quo of investment management and banking in general. From FPM principals being not little unaffected by the wrought global financial crisis. As prototype case study our enterprise raison d’etre was made vivid by the association between Blackstone Group and SAC Capital (now private corner-shop "Point72 Asset Management"). That mild reporter termed “insider trading scandal” is more telling than mere smoke and mirror PR, about corruption in corporate banking life over the past 35, at least, years. 

A Diary and Degree Recommendation

With this missive, Kristian, as a founding principal of FPM, flowers into the Spring of Joys on Easter Day, after an "Icarus Type of Year in 2014". Like the myth of Icarus, FPM in aggregation of meditating and endeavour with our enterprise, reach excessive heights, and yet sadistically our self / ego does not let our feet touch the ground! Icarus was the Greek mythological protagonist of complacency and hubris. Making an escape with wings made of feather and wax, and therefore warned not to fly too high close to the sun since it would melt the wax, or fly close to the sea as the salt degrade. Therefore Icarus was heedless and crashed into the sea, flying too high. Also, in equal measure of philosophical antithesis is 'Phoenix Rising From the Ashes'. But of course, before Spring arrives the season of Winter descends. This holistic approach is relevant in FPM reputation model of financial perpetrators having 'priors'.
FPM’s Kristian on Christmas Day gutting road-kill deer near Cornwall.
So on Christmas Day, I was gutting and skinning my first ever road-kill deer with friends in Cornwall (see picture above). As a diary there is also a tenuous link to the FPM premise. Between Cornwall and London the car party passed a premier hedge fund related name of a place, "Bridgwater" in the county of Somerset, England. Bridgwater is actually spelt without an ‘e’ in ‘bridge’ on the road signs. Oh, my dear Lord! We have made punt for one of our prospective FPM enterprise partners, and a pun on the word "deer", respectively; hopefully noted by the aficionados of my joined-up verbiage.


Bridgewater Associates is nominated as FPM's ©NSWF: Reputation ‘halo-wearing’ degree hedge fund enterprise. If you are in finance and you do not know Bridgewater: currently they have some US$165 bn of saver’s money under management, from a sector capital base of some US$2.8 trillion, as at end 2014. If indeed any practice can be of such ‘halo-wearing’ virtuosity, in an arguably scurrilous money siphoning-off business, as is a range of investment banking and related activities. Hence why FPM’s ©NSWF:Reputation rating is based by degrees of reputation.

Mr Dalio’s ©NSWF:Reputation  - ‘Halo-Wearing Degree’ (Source: FPM, Bloomberg)
Through preliminary feasibility observations, we have yet to uncover any financial improprieties, misdeeds and misdemeanours of this leading, yet somewhat unknown money management company. Since the corporate historical reputation of Bridgewater is inextricably tied to its leader, we present Ray Dalio, who founded in 1975 and retired as its chairman in 2011. Mr Dalio is still chief investment officer sharing the role with Robert Prince and Greg Jensen.  Of course an FPM principal has investor experience of Bridgewater and, discovered media-depth knowledge about them. For the full ‘halo-wearing’ rating research recommendation please feels free to engage us. Or indeed, please contact us to contradict our promotion of Bridgewater Associates in our praiseworthy ©NSWF:Reputation, for whom we are still going over data with the proverbial “fine comb”.

As Easter, in one original sense, was a pagan Goddess of Spring, as a symbol of fertility we liken our ‘think-do in-time ideas’ as a new birth: of assigning reputation not only through a 'financial hate list' as some describe it, but with praiseworthy exemplifications too. With our groundbreaking exemplar case studies involving Blackstone Group, as largest investor in insider-trading scandalised SAC Capital, FPM implement corporate and principals' reputation in vogue. FPM permanently crystallises the negative taints and rumoured impression from associations in financial malfeasance of the measured past. Even whether the entity in legality or prejudiced law was ever convicted and / or acquitted is necessarily irrelevant to one having garnered a good or bad reputation. Not too much unlike what financial ratings agencies and auditors are responsibly supposed to do in earnest fiduciary professionalism.

Unfortunately the fiduciary tier of financial responsibility from institutionalisation has bought them into collusive conflict of interest relationships verging on cronyism. Thereby evoking incidences of collaboration corruption corroboration and other deceitful tricks and traits which FPM manifests into a reputation i.e. no smoke with fire. A light allusion or hint to a financial misdemenour is like stating "mud sticks". While this counter-PR, setting the record straight, is a virtuous enterprise. In an old fashion sense, battling lies and truth-telling as a commercial enterprise has sought a backer to sponsor these esteemed value-set with pride. Who better to uphold integrity than the purveyors of it! Bridgewater Associates’ highly reputable profile serves as a counter-point to  financial roguery. Also, while the NSWF:Reputation garnered firms’ or principals’ may having rising and ebbing ratings over time, the reasons, at least in the mind of FPM’s principles, is clear. At a time when unprecedented and rife financial malfeasance has contributed to the deepest economic recession since 1930’s, our mission no less is to follows a checking mechanism. An FPM progressive stop-check rationale here is echoing a public comment published in the LA Times, about how to treat insider-trader trading cheats, from the now demised Drexel Burnham Lambert’s scandals: 

As the courts and legal system are so lenient on so-called first-time offenders… may I suggest an appropriate punishment in the form of public humiliation?” 
Carol Roper, Redondo Beach, LA Times  - Humiliation Is the Cure, March 15, 1987


"Are You ????????, I's Just Like to Know What's What and Who's Who, You Know?!" BBC 1, "Holby City", 14th April, 2015