Buhlmann's Corner
2015 at long last – opportunity should knock provided conditions stay good!
To tell the truth, it’s terribly boring to follow stock market prices. They go up, they stay the same, but still there are lots of people who get excited, even amazed.
Mathematics calls it a zero-sum game, but that doesn’t mean that the principal stays the same. Last year, one of the newest kids on the block, one Jack Ma, launched his Alibaba.com on the stock market and watched his personal fortune swell by 87-88 thousand million dollars (Bloomberg Billionaires Index) rendolo liquido. It’s anyone‘s guess which legitimate enterprise he invested his young shares in, and what blunt instruments he will be empowered to wield as owner. People buy chunks of history, hope and the belief that “it’ll all work out.". The same as occurred with Rocket Internet of Germany, albeit on a much smaller scale. Indeed I suggest you read the most recent quarterly report and share my amazement. I felt I was reading fluff, clouds of absolute nothing that could justify optimism in any future result.
And so the beat goes on. One man’s Momo Inc is another man’s Zalando. You do one to get rich or you do the other because you hope you’ll come out on top in the machinations of the mathematical zero-sum game". Remember the famous resistance to hostile take-overs? Particularly high-profile.in 2014 was the fall of Rhön-Klinikum where the company founder was made to slip on the banana skin of his own power system. Then there was the case of Sika the Swiss special chemicals manufacturer, who wanted to protect his company. The major shareholder eloped to safer havens with the prospective buyer Saint Gobain, and the minority capital was left hanging between the gullible and/or the halfwits!
Talking about gullible and halfwits, it has been decided that taxes need to be lowered while Europe sets new obligations on how corporations are to present their reports. But why? Shouldn’t the “legal contractor” – the side defending legality (in this case the politicians and the legislature) – be more helpful? Why not have them report directly to themselves, acting with rectitude instead of pulling up new bureaucratic obligations garnished with that idiotic little phrase “no expenditure””.
Innovation does happen though, albeit infrequently. Take, for example, Johannes Thyssen who, after years of irresponsible apathy finally set out on a path of indisputable logic to split up E.on, and thus pass the buck for the national energy policy to those who, rightly or wrongly, invented it, shifting its budget out of the private sector and into the public one. .
2015 is ushering in innovation, the so-called T2S for instance, that few people are talking about now, but that everyone will be talking about soon. Or the general meeting of V I P industries in Mumbai – why not arrange to meet there? To tell the truth, now, the narrative of shares is shaping up to being very interesting indeed.