It is deep in the investor physique to have a flash of trepidation when the contemporary eclipses the established, doubly so when it is the novel contrasted with the well understood. For example, the day Facebook became more valuable than Boeing; or Nintendo generated more sales than Toyota (albeit only for a short time).

Argentina. Home to the Patagonian Mountains, Iguazu Falls, and regular sovereign defaults. Familiar, but still fascinating – which could describe a glass of Malbec, or just as easily the Argentinean economy at large. Like the wine, investors in June of last year expected the economy to improve with time, having piled $2.75bn into its selfdescriptive ‘century bond’ and setting a new high watermark for bull market insanity.

Felonious footnotery is an overstatement. But reading the financing small print of KKR & Co.’s latest buyout would be enough to make even Michael Milken blush.

If the high-yielding bonds of Netflix and Telsa are a little dull for you then maybe WeWork Companies Inc. can provide you with something a bit less plain vanilla.

Whether devotee or skeptic, crypto-currency is seldom if ever boring - although both interest and value alike have ebbed substantially since the new year. Of the over 1,400 cryptocurrencies on offer, the big boys on the block make up three-quarters of the value (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple) and have declined 49%, 71%, 60% and 40% respectively.

The free market’s nemesis is surely the supply of free money. And incessant has that supply been of late. In less than three decades, central bank balance sheets have ballooned from $400 billion (having taken 75 years to get to that point) to a now $22 trillion (trillion with a ‘t’) which is a lot of money even if you say it quickly.

Jim Grant quipped during a monetary policy hearing that the United States Federal Reserve Bank had replaced the Gold Standard with the PhD Standard. It’s been seven years to the day since Jim’s admonishment – how right (or wrong) was he?

There is a lot of wealth being created and not enough safe ways of transferring that wealth into the future.

“President for life”. It’s a grandiose title, no doubt. But its allure is directly related to which particular institution one is going to be president of; and for which period of history. In the instance of Emperor Xi and his highly geared fiefdom – the People Republic of China – there is less allure than some think.

It’s not quite checking the car seats for loose coins and old McDonald’s fries, but it’s pretty close.

Evan Spiegel, one of the co-founders of Snapchap and its current CEO (read Snap Inc. NYSE: SNAP), already has an interesting life CV. He’s a Stanford University alumni – well, almost. He dropped out of design school shortly after receiving thunderous ridicule from classmates for his Snapchatesque idea at the time. He’s also the youngest billionaire in the world (or at least was in 2015 – he may be been pipped recently by the adolescent Hugh Grosvenor, heir to the Duke of Westminster’s fortune ).

Interspersed with the near real-time machinations of Boss Tweet over the course of last year, heavy consumers of US financial press may have also noticed a certain nameless trader with a habit of picking up VIX call options priced around $0.50 per contract – the press has dubbed him or her “50 Cent” (which is of course also the name of a rapper who, in 2003, released the chart-topping album Get Rich or Die Tryin’).

Anyone long enough in the tooth to remember the Beatles break-up or the death of Elvis may also have been around to witness the infamous Institute of Directors speech by Gerald Ratner. Also affectionately known at the prawn sarnie speech, the then CEO and heir apparent of British jewellery company – the Ratners Group – wiped off $700 million of value and caused the near collapse of his father’s company with a single speech; one highlight was: “we even sell a pair of earrings for under a pound, which is cheaper than a shrimp sandwich from Marks and Spencer, but probably wouldn’t last as long.”

For those that have become tired of trading the Satoshi special (aka ‘bitties’, ‘digies’, ‘Nakas’ or just BitCoin) and need something to do until the ‘Lehman Brothers Coin’ is unleashed upon the world a week from Monday – enter: the Bank of Montreal’s FANG+. It’s an exchanged traded product that is sure to put hair on your chest.

The Brazilian real stands tall atop the currency pile at present (the sovereign backed kind of currency anyway), at least according to Pam Woodall’s celebrated Big Mac index – a measure of how many delicious McDonald’s burgers you can buy with US$50. According to they, such script denoting the Efígie da República is overvalued to the tune of 61%. The country’s neighbours are on the podium also (Chile; Columbia for silver and bronze) but there is gulf between them, and the leader. The rising purchasing-parity of the real is also in lock-step with the surging Ibovespa index - ‘two-x’, as the parlance goes - closing north of 80,000 yesterday up from 40,000 in Jan of 2016; along with the real-denominated bond market which is similarly on the surge.

If you are among the ninety-nine point nine per cent who missed out on the last big Paulson and Icahn trades of ’07/08 then maybe you will get another shot at something similar in the Land Down Under.

f you are among the ninety-nine point nine per cent who missed out on the last big Paulson and Icahn trades of ’07/08 then maybe you will get another shot at something similar in the Land Down Under.

That terse minimalist prose is the strapline of OTC traded The Crypto Company, a California based company that - in the last 10 days - has seen its share price achieve geometric astonishment. Trust. Credibility. Innovation.

It reads a little bit like the beginning of a riddle: what has no utilitarian value, produces nothing, has a value entirely dependent on artificial scarcity and is worth US$117,000?

South African private equity performance when compared to the listed market counterpart remains ahead by a nose, according to the latest Q2 2017 RisCura-SAVCA South African Private Equity Performance Report.