When you’ve got ridiculous amounts of money, the usual rules of wealth go out of the Georgian windows.
If hedge fund manager Michael Platt wants to buy himself a waxwork gorilla nailed to a wooden cross, who am I to argue? I suspect the Micawber principle still applies.
Platt, 41, is the co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, a London-based hedge fund group with over $16 billion under management. Its main fund rose 41% and earned over $400 million in fees in the year to October 2009.
This week saw the launch of a big money competition from Shopify, a leading online store vendor.
The American entrant who sets up the new Shopify store that achieves the greatest turnover within any two-month period over the next six months will win $100,000.
Full details here.
Sadly, the rest of us around the world (even Canadians!) aren’t eligible for the cash prize.
But we can still claim the moral high ground by beating our Colonial cousins. We can also access the tutorials and forums that Shopify is running.
And, of course, we can make money!
While life goes on in Canada and Siberia under drifts, Britain has been crippled by snow. Again.
London is cloaked by a smog of emissions and the hot air of millions of rat-racers, so the snow hasn’t got a hope of sticking – the view from my window is of a metropolis sprinkled with dandruff, not of gridlock.
But with many major roads blocked in the suburbs and trains marooned, lots of commuters have heeded police warnings not to travel to work due to snow. And with over 30% of schools closed, many who could dig their way to their office are instead watching Teletubbies and making snowmen with their kids.
So far, so no big deal. We don’t get snow often, so we shouldn’t spend billions on snowmobiles and fleets of gritters. And those ‘snow costs billions to the UK economy’ figures are always spurious, since they don’t consider the tangible benefit to millions of a day spent free from office politics!
What is shocking though is that some employers are docking pay if staff can’t get to work, or encouraging them to take the day off as holiday.
According to the New York Times, venture capitalists want to put more money into technology investments, after parting with a mere $14 billion in 2009, compared to $36 billion in 2007.
Technology start-ups are doing everything from speeding up the Web to making office photocopiers more iPod-like, and as the article notes some will go public:
Venture capitalists make most of their money on initial public offerings of the tech companies they invested in.
But in each of the last two years, fewer than 10 companies have gone public, compared with 86 in 2007.
The new year could finally break the logjam, bringing more than 50 tech offerings, investment bankers say. That could include prominent companies like Facebook.
That is welcome news after a dark year, Mr. Dhaliwal said. “The mood is pretty optimistic, in that way that if you’re nearly killed in a car accident you’ve got a renewed positive outlook on life.”
Good news if you’re an investment banker, but what if you’re an investor?
