You can never count the U.S. out

Tony Boeckh (of the Bank Credit Analyst) puts the case for today’s America best: “It’s got a trillion-dollar deficit monkey on its back, its consumers have been gutted, its housing and banking sectors could take years to recover, and its currency is a dog…. You can never count the U.S. out – it has an incredible ability to rediscover itself and rejuvenate.”

Deloitte reports Private Equity's Confidence

Private equity is stepping up and getting the results where the public market lags. A report from Deloitte goes on to explain:

 There is still confidence and optimism among private equity fund managers (GPs), according to the latest Mena Private Equity Confidence Survey released by Deloitte. The annual survey, conducted for Deloitte by Arbor Square Associates, is designed to measure confidence and market sentiment in the private equity market.

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Jacoline Loewen, Private Equity expert and author of Money Magnet.

4 Lessons from Physics for Marketing

Marketing and physics do seem a natural combination but here is a talk by Dan Cobley, a physics expert, on 4 lessons marketing can draw from the common laws of physics.

NI 31-103 is a really bold change

Individuals and firms who distribute exempt-market securities are scrambling to meet the new requirements they’ll face beginning Sept. 28. In fact, some are even moving out of the exempt-securities realm altogether as they assess the drastic regulatory reforms associated with National Instrument 31-103.

The new regulations include widespread changes for exempt-market dealers. EMDs include those who distribute prospectus-exempt securities such as hedge funds, principal-protected notes and limited partnerships, as well as those who work with accredited investors. 

“This is the one area of NI 31-103 that is a really bold change,” says Geoffrey Ritchie, executive director of the Toronto-based Exempt Market Dealers Association of Canada. “It’s a huge transition.”

Most of NI 31-103’s new regulations came into effect on Sept. 28, 2009. However, existing EMD firms and reps had one year to comply with some of the requirements. Regulators are warning that registrants who fail to meet the looming deadline could face immediate suspension until they comply.

For firms dealing in exempt securities, the upcoming deadline includes new capital requirements, beefed-up disclosure rules and new filing requirements for financial statements. Dealing reps at these firms, meanwhile, face new proficiency requirements under which they must successfully complete either the Canadian securities course offered by Toronto-based CSI Global Education Inc. or the more specialized exempt-market products course offered by the Investment Funds Institute of Canada’s IFSE Institute. 

Chief compliance officers with EMDs are also required to complete one of these two courses, along with either IFSE’s officers, partners and directors course or CSI’s partners, directors and senior officers course.

The new proficiency requirements are intended to protect investors, according to the Ontario Securities Commission, by ensuring that reps who deal with the exempt market meet minimum qualifications.
Find out more about the Exempt Market Dealers Association http://www.emdacanada.com/

Big, greedy drug companies don't do any research

Innovation seems to be thought of as something that just happens - shezaam, eureka. The head of Government Health in South Africa back in 1994, demanded that the greedy pharmas hand over their drugs at cost and went on to berate corporate drug companies. That health minister is now dead but the argument about greedy pharma continues. Derek Lowe has something to say to the folks who claim that all the "real" research on pharmaceuticals is done in universities, and drug companies just steal

Allow me to rant for a bit, because I saw yet another argument the other day that the big drug companies don't do any research, no, it's all done at universities with public funds, at which point Big Pharma just swoops in and makes off with the swag. You know the stuff. Well, I would absolutely love to have the people who hold that view explain the PPAR story to me. I really would. The drug industry poured a huge amount of time and money into both basic and applied research in that area, and they did it for years. No one has to take my word for it - ask any of the academic leaders in the field if GSK or Merck, to name just two companies, managed to make any contributions.

We did it, naturally, because we expected to make a profit out of it in the end. The whole PPAR story looked like a great way to affect metabolic disorders and plenty of other diseases as well: cancer, inflammation, cardiovascular. That is, if we could just manage to understand what was going on. But we didn't. Once we all figured out that nuclear receptors were involved and got busy on drug discovery on that basis, we didn't help anyone with any diseases, and we didn't make any profits. Big piles of money actually disappeared during the process, never to be seen again. You could ask Merck about that, or GSK (post-rosiglitazone), or Lilly, or BMS, or Bayer, and plenty of other players large and small.

No one hears about these things.  We're understandably reluctant to go on about our failures in this industry, but the side effect is that people who aren't paying attention end up thinking that we don't have any. Nothing could be more mistaken. And they aren't failures to come up with a catchy slogan or to find a good color scheme for the packaging - they're failures back at the actual science, where reality meets our ideas about it, and likely as not beats them down to the floor.

Honestly, I don't understand where these they-don't-do-any-research folks get off. Look at the patent filings. Look at the open literature. Where on earth do you think all those molecules come from, all those research programs to fill up all those servers? There are whole scientific journals that wouldn't exist if it weren't for a steady stream of failed research projects. Where's it all coming from?