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Burford – Illegal Market Manipulation?

Burford Capital (BUR) have issued an announcement that makes a number of allegations about the events surrounding the recent shorting attack on the company involving Muddy Waters. It includes: Spoofing and layering to move the share price, e.g. putting in numerous share sales on the order book and cancelling them before they can be filled. That includes numerous such transactions just before Muddy Waters issued a tweet giving Burford as the target, and as that tweet was delayed only Muddy Waters ...

Asset Managers With $74 Trillion on Brink of Historic Shakeout

Readers may find this Bloomberg analysis of the asset management industry interesting. It is full of lots of data and interesting charts. It highlights the move towards passive and the high costs of active funds. see https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-asset-management-in-decline/ Asset Managers With $74 Trillion on Brink of Historic Shakeout By Suzy Waite, Annie Massa and Christopher Cannon 8 August 2019 The industry that gave rise to investing titans Peter Lynch, Bill Miller and Bill Gross is facing an existential crisis. For years, mom-and-pop investors frustrated by high fees ...

Burford Capital, Goals Soccer Centres, Carillion, and Why Numbers Are Not Important

To follow on from my previous comments this morning on Burford Capital (BUR), this is a typical “shorting” attack where the shorter (Muddy Waters) and their supporters make a lot of allegations which investors are unable to verify in any useful time frame. I certainly questioned the accounting approach used by Burford and other litigation finance firms as I commented on it back in June, but disentangling the factual accusations in the Muddy Waters dossier from innuendo and comment is not ...

Market Crashes and Burford Capital

Investors might have been panicked by the recent market falls driven by the US/China trade wars, Brexit and gloomy economic forecasts. As usual, the UK market is led by the US markets. The S&P 500 is down 5% since the 26th July even though there was a slight bounce upwards yesterday. There can be few readers portfolios which have not suffered some impact because there were few stocks that did not fall. Now I am an inveterate trend follower so how did ...

RBS Shareholder Event Tuesday 10 September 2019, 6pm – 8pm in London.

I am very pleased to report progress at RBS on shareholder engagement with individual investors. The next event will take place on Tuesday 10 September 2019, 6pm – 8pm in London. If you are interested in attending this event please email your full name, postcode and Shareholder Reference Number (if known) to rbseventlondon@computershare.co.uk by Friday 23 August 2019. On the 25 November 2019 RBS are planning a virtual shareholder event. Further information regarding this event and how to participate will be made available soon. I ...