The Tasgall Group

From the Financial News by way of DealBook:

Some investors are deterred by funds that charge fees below the standard scale of 1.5% to 2% management fees and 20% performance fees.

A partner at a multibillion-[dollar] hedge fund manager said some had declined to invest in a new fund it launched because its fees were low: ?They could not take us seriously,? he said.

Just like with many products aimed at the high end of the market, a high price gives a perception of high value regardless of actual ability to deliver that higher value.

Found over at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis (about half-way down the page):

The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter is reporting ?Twelve lenders have now gone caput since December 2006?. This number has has been increasing at a rate of 1-2 a week since December. Two of those lenders were among the top twenty subprime lenders. One of them was Ownit Mortgage, the other was Mortgage Lender Network. Ownit Mortgage and MLN both went bankrupt.

Mish wrote that post yesterday, and today the number is at 13.? Ouch.

Oohh… pretty:

Read more about the world wealth density… and a few other random thoughts at Econobrowser.

The figure was released in a study by McKinsey & Co. that maps financial assets around the globe and seeks to track the flows of these assets as they move from one region to another, putting hard numbers on the oceans of capital washing up around the globe.

Read more at BigPicture.

There is a list of 25 potential surprises for 2007 by Doug Kass at The Street.com. I actually like the summary version at The Big Picture as it’s briefer but still has the same amusing punch.

These are not intended to be predictions, but rather “events that have a reasonable chance of occurring, despite the general perception that the odds are very long.” (more…)

As the year winds to a close, it is worth reviewing how the different asset classes performed this year… Thanks to the nifty tools at ETF Screen.com, it’s pretty easy to look at the 1 year performance of the myriad of sector ETFs out there…

To start, here are the high-level categories and their returns (yes, I’m rounding):

• IVV (S&P 500) – up 14%
• TLT (US Bonds) – up less than 1%
• EFA (International Stocks) – up 25%
• VNQ (REITs) – up 35%
• GLD (Gold) – up 23%

Amazingly, according to the screener, only 7 of the 240 ETFs are down for the year. (I’m not including funds like SLV that did not exist on 1/1/06.) There are 340 ETFs included in the list, 120 created since January!

Maybe 2006 will be remembered as the year when everything went up at the same time… (more…)

Today’s trading took the Dow Jones Industrial Average past the 12,500 mark. There’s nothing significant about this fact other than the fact that our society uses base-10 numbers and we add significance to round numbers that are divisible by 10 or 100.

That aside, the ascent of the Dow since mid-July is quite breathtaking… nearly a 15% rise since the low point of the year with nary a dip along the rise. There’s not much to add that we haven’t said before, but I figured I’d say it again as we go into the last two days of 2006.

The start of January should be interesting as it is the end of “tax-loss-selling” season and we will see if market participants are eager to buy in the new year or if the enthusiasm is lacking…

What happened to my mutual fund holding OAKIX? It’s down 13% today!

(more…)

Starting in April, the Internet search company will let rank-and-file staff auction off their stock options to the highest bidding institutional investor, the company said Tuesday. [MarketWatch]

It seems like the Googleplex has found another way to work the markets for every last cent…? By selling stock options in the open market, employees can collect the current value available from exercising stock options, and also collect a time premium for the remaining life of the options.

I’m curious how the SEC will interpret this…

From today’s Dealbook email:

REIT mergers and acquisitions have reached record levels this year. Some 22 transactions totaling $102.8 billion, including debt, have been announced according to the research company SNL Financial, compared with 11 deals valued at $28.8 billion for all of last year and a total of $92 billion in transactions for the last six years combined.

Go to Article from The New York Times

Also noteworthy, Dealbook has an entire section on the happenings in Real Estate M&A for those of you following the REIT story closely…

It seems like the vogue thing today to buy any steady-stream of cash producing asset like real estate (even skyscrapers), leverage to the hilt, package and sell the asset and debt, and in the process reap the rewards. The impact to publicly traded REITs is obvious from a liquidity analysis standpoint (a la TrimTabs) — everything keeps going up!