Brian Bollen's Blog

CTM

I've written a number of full-length novels, which are in what the publishing industry cutely refers to as the pre-published stage.

Gross Encounters is a laugh-out-loud raucous account of the time my friends and I spent as a young student working in a haunted hotel in a small town in the Swiss Alps (i.e. Wengen in the Bernese Oberland).

00 Scale follows the adventures of a tongue-tied easily embarrassed mid-teenager struggling to cope with the primeval urge to find a girlfriend while fighting to win a Subbuteo table football league championship.

Cave Cenam is a mid-life crisis rite of passage novel, in which the central character and his friend set out to arrange a fantasy dinner with their long-lost childhood sweethearts, with life-changing results.

Two Dead Men Got Up To Fight: an EHD novel, is the story of a unique detective partnership, forged to solve a unique case, re-opened when a murder victim from 25 years earlier is found dead.

Hot Metal, Cold Heart follows this partnership as they try to solve the mystery surrounding a string of fantastic murders in the world of international journalism.

CTM remains something of a work in progress, but tells the story of how two people find themselves growing closer together, and achieving happiness together against the odds, when they join a speaking club that is in fact a front for the largest singles organisation in Britain.

And I've just started preliminary work on That Was Then, This Is Now. This tale of thwarted love begins with the arrival of an email in 2011, the dateline of which shows it was sent in the spring of 1972.

If you'd like to read one or two sample chapters, let me know. And if you want to read the rest we can work out a suitable financial arrangement.

Which Way Next?

I have also edited a book by a long-standing friend, Richard Meredith, a business journalist turned traveller and adventurer in his middle age.

Richard had the insane idea of driving a family car, a Daewoo Kalos, affectionately known as the Green Goddes (GG) from the home of the manufacturer in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, to its spiritual home in South Korea, Seoul. Accompanying him throughout was his co-driver, affectionately known as The Kid.

If you like the sample that follows of the resulting book, which contains hair-raising, thought-provoking and stomach-churning episodes in Afghanistan, India and on the high seas, is called Which Way Next? you can order the full volume from:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Which-Way-Next-Daewoo-Challenge/dp/095414323X/ref=sr_1_2/202-0785617-5551806?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180372962&sr=8-2

Reid & Co Unveil Leadership Ambitions

An evening in the company of Dr John Reid and his friends on June 16 2006 sparked off the following stream of consciousness, an extract from which appeared in the Financial Times Observer diary early the following week. Although the lead item has apparently been killed off by subsequent events, I still very much enjoyed the creative process that brought it into being, and realise that diarists really do have the easiest jobs in journalism!

Leadership Bid
Could Dr John ‘Attack Dog’ Reid be preparing himself for a leadership bid in the event that Prime Minister Tony Blair does fulfil his promise to stand down at some yet-to-be-determined date? Anyone listening to his address to a celebratory dinner in Glasgow last Friday might have been forgiven that the event was being held to launch his campaign to become Prime Minister rather than to mark the closure and demolition of his former school, St Patrick’s High School in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire.

Letting down what’s left of his hair, and drawing himself up to his full five feet six (or is it five feet four?), Dr Reid spoke energetically and emotionally about his life, his time at the school and, some suspect, his plans for the future. Sounding suspiciously Old Labour, even Soviet Socialist, Dr Reid called the attention of his adoring like-minded audience to the need for passion on the part of those in public life. “Without it, people might as well vote for dessicated calculating machines or synthetic creations of the media.”

Dessicated calculating machines? Synthetic creations of the media? Who can he have been thinking of? Do the names Gordon Brown and David Cameron spring quickly to mind?

Custody Evolution Continues

A version of this article first appeared in Global Investor magazine in May 2007

In common with virtually every other area of the financial services industry, custody has undergone enormous upheaval over the past decade. In common with virtually every other area of the financial services industry, custody continues to experience change and continues to evolve. This evolution is epitomised by the use of the terms ‘securities services’ or ‘asset servicing’ to describe the industry as it moves further up the value chain and away from its roots in simple safekeeping, and tackles head on the challenges posed by increasingly complex derivatives contracts.

“The increasing diversification of investment activity, additional asset classes and the extensive use of alternative and derivative instruments on a global scale has placed asset servicing firms as key partners for investment managers,” adds Francis Jackson, head of New Business Development and Client Management for JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services in Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Describing that as custody would be like comparing the horseless carriage to a Formula 1 race car. With the emergence of middle and back office outsourcing, asset servicing is now a capital allocation decision made at corporate board level, which is not something that the market is used to from a ‘custodian’.” In order to be closer to clients in key growth markets, JPMorgan says it is setting up sales and relationship management offices in South Africa, Switzerland and the Middle East, following similar moves in the Netherlands and Germany. JPMorgan will hire locally to staff these offices, says Francis Jackson.

ETFs Grow Into Investment Landscape

A version of this article appeared in Global Investor magazine in May 2007

In the seven years since their introduction into Europe, exchange-traded funds have become an important part of the investment landscape. With an estimated $600 billion assets in ETFs globally in early 2007 being forecast to reach $2 trillion by 2011, ETFs are reaching a critical phase in their development. Brian Bollen assembled half a dozen of investment industry experts at the Zurich headquarters of SWX Swiss Exchange and virt-x, to discuss the future of ETFs in Europe.

Who’s Who?
Brian Bollen: an international financial journalist for 22 years, a Fellow of the ifs School of Finance (FIFS), and chairman of the Global Investor ETF Round Table in Zurich on April 24 2007.

Peter Thompson, executive director, equities, at Goldman Sachs International in London, looks after GSI’s European ETF and synthetic business.

Alexander Hoffmann, head of banks and financial institutions at the Zurich branch of Pioneer Global Investments, Dublin, responsible for sales of active investments.

Thorsten Michalik, director, db x-trackers, based in Frankfurt, has run Deutsche Bank’s ETF business for the past 12 months; previously responsible for listed warrants and certificates in Asia.

Alain Picard, assistant vice president, product & services management/equity, at SWX in Zurich, ETF product manager for SWX Virt-x.

Roger Bootz, vice president, exchange-traded funds and derivatives, Switzerland, for Société Générale corporate and investment banking, Zurich.

David J Saaty, managing partner, GI GlobalInvest, Zurich, formerly of Merrill Lynch and Schroders; set up own multi-manager boutique in 1996 running pension fund money.

It's The Rules That Do It

I took part in my first competition at Elder Gate Toastmasters before I had even made my debut speech. It was at the club's annual Humorous Speech competition in September 2004, held at The Cock Hotel in Stony Stratford

I’m not entirely sure I should be doing this. A humorous speech in front of 26 people when I haven’t even finished writing my ice-breaker. But then my wife, Margaret, will tell you I’ve never been one for doing things the right way round.

I used to believe rigidly in rules. Then I went to University where I was forced to study new, alien subjects. A little bit of moral philosophy is a dangerous thing. It teaches you to think rather than follow blindly.

That might explain why I jumped at the chance to take part when Danny said someone had dropped out.

BUCKSKINANNY!!

I made my debut speech at Elder Gate Toastmasters in Milton Keynes in October 2004. Although it is written as a speech, to be performed rather than read, I hope you enjoy reading it

BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!

That was my first word. Not Mum. Not Dad. And certainly not Mamma or Dadda. Anyone saying Mamma or Dadda round our way wouldn’t have lasted long. Infants were not exempt from the general law of the jungle.

BUCKSKINANNY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Said just like that. It came from the name of a family who lived opposite us in Airdrie. Their name was Buckson, and even by the standards of a post-industrial town built on coal and iron and steel they were a bit below the salt. The corruption of their name had become a howl of derision.

I was about three before I spoke. At one point everyone thought I must be retarded. That boy’s no right, you could hear them say at Mum’s sewing classes. Or in the Italian café in town. I’m telling you, he’s no right. Never says a word.

The Future's Bright, The Future's Russia

A version of this article first appeared in Global Investor magazine in early 2007

On June 16 1989, Norwich Union launched an advertising campaign based on the premise that investment in what was still then the Soviet Union would become the norm in years to come. The campaign focused on the ‘Mirov 11’, an imaginary sports turbo car of the future, representing the kind of investment opportunity people could one day share through a Norwich Union savings and investment plan. While some reservations remain today about the rule of law and the attitude of the ruling authorities to private ownership and profit, it seems that Russia’s day has now come. It puts the ‘R’ in the increasingly fashionable acronym BRIC, which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China.

A new report from Grant Thornton underlines dramatically the investment opportunities that could lie in store for these four countries, of which Russia is the most interest for the purposes of this story. Based on 7,200 interviews in 32 economies, the report contains a number of compelling statistics, including the bold prediction that by 2050 the BRIC countries will account for 44% of global GDP (gross domestic product) compared with 27% in 2005, and just 13% in 1975. The report predicts that by 2050, the average income in both India and Russia will be around the current US level of $41,300.

Crisis? What crisis?

This article first appeared in the summer 2006 issue of European Fund Manager

The pension fund ‘crisis’ made its way out of the trade journals and onto the front pages of Europe’s favourite newspapers many many months ago, and has appeared there intermittently but prominently ever since. And this is despite the efforts of politicians in many countries to distract our attention with a series of top-notch farces ranging from the Italian election results and the reluctance of the loser to leave office, and Britain’s quadruple whammy in late April: the home secretary and his foreign prisoner problem, the health secretary being ridiculed at a nursing conference, the defence secretary found to have cannabis in his constituency home, and the Deputy Prime Minister with a totally unexpected and literally unbelievable successful track record in extra-marital sex.

The immediacy and potency of the pension crisis has almost become an article of faith to believe in it, like the Virgin Birth, Resurrection from the dead, and Transubstantiation (the doctrine that the communion wafer literally becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ at the moment of Consecration). Anyone who questions its very existence is dubbed a heretic and unbeliever, who must be made to recant. Just as with global warming (or, to give its new name, climate change, a label applied once the penny dropped that in recent years it’s actually been significantly colder and wetter than for a decade or two previously.

What Next For Funds of Private Equity Funds?

This article first appeared in Private Equity News in early 2007

What possible role can funds of private equity funds continue to play in the modern world? Surely their time has come, and gone, and will not be seen again. Everyone who is anyone knows just what private equity is. Everyone who is anyone and has money to invest can bypass the funds of funds, and simply invest direct.

As one industry participant puts it, however, it is not that straightforward. “We have an in-house joke,” says one fund of funds specialist in private equity. “Whenever I hear a first-time investor saying that, I go straight to my colleagues and tell them I’ve identified a future secondary.”

Despite the air of awkward resentment building up around the subject in the UK as trade unions start to complain about job losses, investors, not just institutions but private individuals, are clamouring to invest in private equity. History shows that it is at the point at which an investment form is at its height of popularity that the greatest dangers lurk. Many agree that in what has become a seller’s market, with the balance of power having swung firmly towards general partners and away from limited partners, private equity is arguably fast approaching that point.

Anders Hilding Goes To The Mattresses

A version of this article appeared in Corporate Financier magazine, issue 92.

Fans of the novel The Godfather will have a quite different view of terms involving movement and mattresses than non-fans will have. In The Godfather, ‘going to the mattresses’ effectively meant a family put its soldiers on battle alert, with a view to ensuring that the family was best prepared for an outbreak of war, and would win the war. For Investcorp, the private equity house with a distinctly middle eastern investor base, going to the mattresses was an exercise that delivered exceptional financial returns in a relatively short time.