Argonautica

Figure 1: Argonaut European Alpha London billboard advertisement 2009 Back in 2009, if you drove out of London on the A4 toward Heathrow, just past Earl’s Court on the Cromwell Road, Argonaut’s one and only attempt at billboard advertising (Figure 1: “Argonaut European Alpha billboard advertisement 2009”) just may have caught your eye. Featuring a folksy, Buffett-like axiom that “once in a decade investment opportunities don’t come around every year,” the advert was an enthusiastic and dangerous…

Our recent visit to China highlighted significant challenges for its economy: although it is an economic model based around low cost manufacturing, China continues to lose competitiveness by pegging its currency to the ever stronger US dollar; its economy is not sufficiently capitalist for its banking system to recognise bad loans and for non-productive capacity to be shut down; infrastructure build continues to be the main government policy tool for stimulus even though the multiplier effect on…

Standard Chartered has this morning announced a loss-making Q3, accompanied by a $5.1bn1 rights issue and a strategic review. As we wrote in August, 'Here for good, or just for now?' we believe that the company had previously been run with too much emphasis on top-line growth and too little regard to prudent provisioning for potential bad loans: in short, previous management of Standard Chartered forgot that banking was a cyclical industry and that with Asian and Emerging Market economies continuing…

Launched in 2009, the Argonaut Absolute Return has achieved a positive return in every calendar year to date, with the price of the fund now up more than 100% since launch.1 Whilst these returns are intrinsically attractive, investing in Absolute Return should also be about delivering attractive returns combined with a risk profile which differs from traditional long only funds and therefore provides portfolio diversification.2 We think that risk profile is more than just standard deviation and that…