Off the Exchange
Kodak and the Great Patent Non-Bubble: It's Not Nortel Revisited
Following the very visible auction of the Nortel patent assets in which a consortium of mobile phone companies kept the portfolio away from Google for a tidy $4.5 billion, activist investors have been pressing boards and management to monetize the …
A Better Mezzanine Lending Structure: It's safer than the traditional model
Mezzanine lending is often regarded as private equity’s poor relation, offering inferior returns for similar levels of risk. While successful equity investment will inevitably outperform lending, it’s not surprising that mezzanine debt is attracting attention, given current market conditions in …
Peer-to-Peer Lending Grows Up: Consumer Loans Attract Large Investors
It’s a dreary, yield-parched landscape for fixed-income investors, but Tom Cahill believes he has found an oasis. Cahill, of Boston-based wealth manager Beaumont Financial Partners, anticipates a 6 to 7 percent return on the $1 million-plus he has put to …
Trade Finance Funds Offer Consistent Returns: Credit focus and structure curb volatility
Good investing should be boring, as legendary financier George Soros is fond of saying. So, you might think that financing relatively small companies in the notoriously unstable commodities sector in Latin America, a region synonymous with loan defaults in the …
New Sources of Capital
While peer-to-peer lending companies aim to transform the consumer credit market largely by disintermediating existing lenders, it’s different in the world of business credit. Here the two most successful start-ups are at least as focused on enabling new capital flows …
Legal Risks of Life Settlements: Careful planning can mitigate risks significantly
Although it is difficult to generalize legal risks associated with life settlements, for purposes of this article they can be divided into four categories: regulatory compliance, fraud in the application, insurable interest and structure. As with insurance generally, life settlement …
Hollywood 2.0: Film Finance Meets Crowdfunding
You may be familiar with the term crowdsourcing, which refers to an organization or individual reaching out to a community through social media tools for help in solving a problem collaboratively. Now, there is crowdfunding, a practice that works in …
A New Investment Model for Film Production and Distribution
Institutional investment in the film and television industry has declined significantly in recent years as risk-averse portfolio managers have labeled such investments as too risky and too illiquid. As a result, fewer movies are being made and distributed. Historically, movies …
Where There’s Infringement, There’s Value: Wireless Communications Intellectual Property
The first thing a secondary patent investor will need to consider when examining a potential patent for acquisition is whether it is being infringed. Patent infringement occurs when a company or individual ships a product or offers a service that …
Investors Renew Interest in Life Settlements
For institutions with patience and appropriate time horizons, life settlements offer an interesting alternative to or supplement for fixed-income exposure, and there is evidence that this investment class is attracting attention. Generally, investors access this asset class by buying pools …
