Investing | Business Post

Meet Ray Dalio, the corporate contrarian who’s ‘shorting Europe’

The founder of Bridgewater is the archetypal hedge fund creator: white, well-educated and idiosyncratic. Right now, the firm is shorting on some of Europe’s biggest companies, among them Adidas and Siemens, Bayer, BNP Paribas and Sanofi. But why?

Conversational AI company Webio raises $4m

Webio assists clients in communicating with customers on sensitive subjects such as credit, collections and payments

The Big Picture

Vincent Boland: ESG movement imploding after falling into the trap of believing its own publicity

The probe into German asset manager DWS has revealed a fatal flaw in the much-lauded concept of ethical investment: no one agrees on what it actually means

Canadian investor takes 3.5% stake in Hostelworld

A subsidiary owned by Prem Watsa has bought just over four million shares in the Irish hostel-booking company, at a cost of about £4m

Fintech Circit raises €6.5m as it plans to double headcount

Dublin-headquartered company’s SaaS platform automates workflows for auditors, corporates and financial institutions

Ian Guider: Troubled times take the shine off crypto

Inflation, pandemic and war should be creating the ideal conditions for bitcoin and its ilk to thrive. Instead they’re behaving like any other risk assets

New syndicate aiming to back female entrepreneurs

The new syndicate, AwakenAngels, also intends to encourage more women to become investors

Vincent Boland: Fall of Archegos could change how the stock market is played

The collapse of the hedge fund, which built a $36 billion house of cards, may be one catalyst among many for the most sweeping reforms of the stock market in decades

Wayflyer investor expects more services from the unicorn as partnerships grow

Yusuf Özdalga, one of Wayflyer’s earliest investors, is confident the Irish start-up will grow quickly and provide more revenue streams in the near future

Vincent Boland: Chronically underperforming Unilever long past its salad days

The venerable British consumer goods giant is now in the crosshairs of a disaffected fund manager who accuses the company of having lost the plot

Doomed to fail: Irish investors speak out on the cost of Ulster Bank’s British pub deals

At the height of the Celtic Tiger, Ulster Bank marketed investment vehicles concerning English pubs that were being offloaded by their owner. But things soon went badly wrong, and the burned Irish investors are still grappling with the consequences years later

Investor Anderson grows stake in Ormonde to over 24 per cent

Veteran stock market player has boosted his influence over mining company with stake now worth just over €1 million

Female-founded companies receive 10 per cent of funding

Irish data defies the international trend in which funding has fallen for female-founded companies since the pandemic took hold

Ian Guider: If property funds fall out of love with Ireland, we will be left bereft

All signs are that the Reits and other investors are washing their hands of our inhospitable property market. If they go, who will back the huge building boost needed to offset our housing crisis?

Founder of eToro calls digital trading ‘a revolution bigger than the internet’

Yoni Assia, whose trading platform is about to go public, has seen it sign up more than five million new users during 2020 alone

Ian Guider: Be careful of what you read on the side of a bus about crypto

With cryptocurrencies all the rage, thanks to social media and a legion of evangelical followers, what protections are there for those placing trust – and real money – in such unregulated financial products?

Vincent Boland: Japanese finance’s favourite Son loses knack of picking winners

Masayoshi Son’s attempt to reinvigorate his beloved SoftBank by mounting a share buyback is a lame attempt to rouse it out of its own inertia

The Profile: Crispin Odey, hedge fund pioneer, Tory donor and Brexiteer

Crispin Odey, a Harrow and Oxford-educated hedge fund manager, has hurled large sums of money at numerous Brexit and eurosceptic organisations as well as the Tory party and the Christian Party: Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship. However, his investments have suffered some major blow-outs and, in March this year, he found himself in court where he was acquitted of indecently assaulting a woman in 1998

Ian Guider: A global climate change war chest is unlikely to materialise

The worlds of finance and business are rewarded for making profit now, not for saving the planet. Until that changes, the goals of Cop26 will be doomed to failure

Vincent Boland: Time to challenge cult of the founder and end golden share

Dual class shares distort the marketplace, undermine the principles of shareholder capitalism, and lead to bad management