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Archive for the ‘Market research’ Category

Funds, REITs Eye IPOs for Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Housing market, Investments, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from Globest.com in regards to possible IPO opportunities.

“LOS ANGELES-Earlier this summer, locally based Colony Financial Inc. filed a registration statement for a $500 million IPO. This organization, experts tell GlobeSt.com, is one of many REITs and opportunity funds that will tap the public markets for liquidity to buy distressed and other assets during the next 12 to 18 months.

Ernst & Young’s Howard Roth with the company’s New York City office points out the market hasn’t seen a flood of fund and REIT public offerings. Nor has Craig Silvers, who is president of Bricks & Mortar Capital, which operates on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles. But both agree that it’s coming.

“Right now, we’re seeing a raft of registrations for mortgage REITs,” Roth says. “During the past six weeks, we’ve seen close to 25 registrations. This is clearly a trend right now. And it’s clearly an avenue that sponsors believe they can take advantage of.”

“Registrations, of course, don’t necessarily mean automatic initial public offerings. Silvers points out that the opportunity funds are definitely being formed to buy distressed assets. Whether they go public or not is a different matter. But it’s becoming a viable alternative.”

In the real estate market earlier this year, a lot of private companies got into trouble,” Silvers says. “The private ones had to liquidate their assets and declare bankruptcy because they couldn’t raise private capital.” However, funds and REITs going public “can tap the public markets for cash whenever an acquisition opportunity comes up,” Silvers remarks.

Roth points out that the benefits of going public include better access to capital and stronger discipline when it comes to accounting, operations and management. Then there is the transparency issue in that investors would know what they’re getting into when they put their money in the stock.”

Read the full article here.

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The Fed Buys 47% of Last Week’s Treasury Notes

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Market research, tagged , , , , on August 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an excellent article from Chris Martensson.

“And now it turns out that 47% (!) of the bonds that were taken by the primary dealers in that auction have been quietly bought by the Fed and permanently secreted to its balance sheet.

They didn’t even wait a full week!  A more honest and open approach would have been for the Fed to simply buy them outright at the auction but this way, using “primary dealers” and “POMOs” and all these other extra steps the basic fact that the Fed is openly monetizing US government debt is effectively hidden from a not-too-terribly inquisitive US press and public.

The speed of the shell game is accelerating.

This immediate repurchase of newly auction bonds by the Fed tells us that demand for these bonds is not nearly as high as advertised, and that things are not quite as strong as represented.

And oh, by the way, don’t expect any stock market weakness while so many billions are being shoveled out the Fed and into the pockets of the primary dealers.  They’ll have to do something with all that freshly minted  cash…..”

Read the full article here.

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Rise In 2Q Cleantech Investment Bodes Well For 3Q

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Investments, Market research, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , on July 31, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good article from The Wall Street Journal Venture Blog.

“After an anemic first quarter, venture capital investments in clean technology rose 73% in the second quarter to a total of $572.1 million, suggesting there is momentum for an industry expected to gain steam from government stimulus funding.

The number of deals in the quarter doubled from the first quarter to 48, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource, which like VentureWire and The Wall Street Journal is owned by Dow Jones & Co. The latest figures are still below the $1.41 billion spread across 57 deals in last year’s second quarter. (See chart at the bottom.)

But the expected release of stimulus money into the sector through grants and incentives should help get investments back on track, said Joe Muscat, Ernst & Young LLP director of cleantech for the Americas.

“Barring any unforeseen capital markets circumstances, I do think we’re in a period of growth here,” Muscat said. “People are looking both at enacted legislation and at the broader climate change legislation that will be a major enabler for companies” in the sector to grow.

During the second quarter, the largest amount of investors’ money – at $157 million – went into energy and electricity generation, which includes solar, geothermal, wind and hydro power, compared with $56 million in the first quarter.

The lion’s share of the total investment in renewable power generation, or $148.2 million, went into solar deals. One of the largest deals in solar during the second quarter was a $25 million Series A round by Mountain View, Calif.-based Skyline Solar Inc., led by New Enterprise Associates.”

Click here for more.

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Zappo provide returns for Sequoia

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, google, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good VC article from Alibaba.

“BURLINGAME, Calif. — Marc Andreessen, in a recent Forbes interview, noted there are hundreds of venture-capital outfits slogging it out right now, trying desperately to squeeze profits out of a terrible investing environment–but only a handful worth their salt.

He’s right. And this week’s news that Amazon.com ( AMZN – news – people ) would buy online-shoe retailer Zappos for $807 million in Amazon stock, plus some cash, highlights the staying power of one of those perennial Sand Hill Road stars, Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia is the notoriously tough firm that backed winners like Google ( GOOG – news – people ), Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), Cisco ( CSCO – news – people ), YouTube and PayPal. (I could go on.) It also owned a big chunk of Zappos, a company with a somewhat unlikely business model that excelled by providing unparalleled customer service and shoe selection on the Web. Sequoia recently told its investors it put about $48 million into Zappos and will get just over $169 million from the Amazon transaction. That’s not a “home run” in VC parlance. But it’s a very respectable return of about three-and-a-half times Sequoia’s original investment, particularly in these depressed times.

In the first six months of this year, there were only four tech-related M&A deals of over $100 million involving companies that took venture capital, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. (There were a few VC-backed IPOs in the first half, too, but no blockbusters.) The biggest of the tech M&A deals, Cisco Systems‘ $590 million purchase of camcorder maker Pure Digital Technologies, also involved Sequoia, which owned a small stake.

Sequoia’s profits from that deal were very small, but it still made a nice return: Sequoia told its investors in March that it invested just over $1.4 million in Pure Digital and would receive $13 million in Cisco shares and $1 million in cash after the acquisition. (The biggest VC-related deal in the first half of this year was Medtronic’s ( MDT – news – people ) $700 million purchase of CoreValve, a company with a new catheter technology to improve heart-valve replacements. Sequoia doesn’t do health care investing.) Plenty of other VCs have sold companies in fire sales this year for less than what investors put into them.”

Read the whole article here.

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Khosla’s Clean Tech VC Fund Beats the Odds, Raises $1bn

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a possitive article from Green Energy Reporter.

“A widely used catch phrase – or some variation of it – appearing in the media since the official start of the crisis this fall,  goes something like this: “the global economic crisis, has left the [add required sector, in our case clean tech] reeling, unable to tap crucial funding…. ” This generic phrase and its variations have been used over and over to describe a harsh reality, specifically  how the credit crunch has left industries across the board at a standstill, unable tap financing to support their growth.

Then there is Khosla Ventures, the Sand Hill Road clean tech-focused venture fund, which will be announcing sometime this week the closing of two funds totalling $1 billion, all dedicated to supporting early clean tech investments. This is impressive, considering that most don’t expect this sort of capital raising to happen until well into 2010.

But it seems that Khosla Ventures, founded by Silicon Valley veteran Vinod Khosla, can afford shortcuts.  For one,  Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a former partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, two leading Silicon Valley pioneers. Also, back in 2004, when clean tech was an afterthought and social media  à la MySpace was all the rage,  he launched Khosla Ventures, one of the sector’s first clean-tech focused VC fund.

Forbes.com reports Khosla is on the verge of announcing two new funds: a $250 million vehicle for seed-stage investments and a $750 million fund for larger deals dubbed “KVIII.” One fund has closed already, and the other could close soon, Forbes reports, citing people with knowledge of the funds. Khosla himself is expected to invest $150 million of his own money in the new funds. Other reported investors include CalPERS, the pension giant with $179.2 billion in assets.”

Read the full article here.

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