Moez Kassam is being attacked, but he is doing well this year.
I had to talk about Moez Kassam, the man of the moment, whose main fund is up 29.3% so far this year. In this chart, you can see a very hard-to-find pattern called “beating the index.”
GMP Capital, which took advantage of an activist situation, and Apollo Healthcare, which made soaps and sanitizers and benefited from the pandemic, were both big winners in the last quarter (up 6x YTD) (up 6x YTD). During the quarter, GMP went up 49%. At the beginning of the year, it was trading close to its cash value.
Apollo is the cleaned-up version of Acasta Enterprises, which I wrote about in my last post. Anson is skilled at shorting small caps that exhibit irrational exuberance in their price movements, such as the new Eastman Kodak stock, which experienced a price increase of twenty times before it crashed.
Even though I am only familiar with a few of Anson’s businesses, I feel compelled to comment on how impressed I am by the originality of some of their ideas. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Canadian who isn’t afraid to take a chance, and I don’t mean to offend anyone by saying that.
According to Anson, he is now in charge of more than one billion Canadian dollars (668 million in the main fund). The company offers a total of five products, four of which are its primary offerings. All of this information comes from the most recent newsletters published by Anson as well as the well-known fund manager that they employ. Trading-focused funds such as Anson are notoriously difficult to comprehend, even for the investors who make use of them.
Blog posts written anonymously about Anson say a variety of things, the most common of which is that he is attempting to manipulate the market. I believe that Anson is going up against dissatisfied promoters of junior stocks, regardless of whether or not those stocks are related to cannabis.
Anson is firing back by retaliating by retaining attorneys, private investigators, and other professionals. We regret to inform you that Black Cube is no longer for sale. I took my time and carefully read the lengthy article that was critical of Anson.
It focuses primarily on topics that are outside of my area of expertise. But at the very end, it discusses how Anson’s actions negatively impacted a stock called Facedrive. That business is nothing more than a bunch of eco-friendly peer-to-peer ridesharing nonsense, but it was recently valued at $2 billion. The most recent time I checked, annual sales were somewhere between one and two million.
Shorting, also known as market spoofing, is a practice that has been described as “a mockery of everything the capital markets are supposed to stand for.” It is believed that Anson engaged in this activity with Facedrive.
You should be able to see how hollow Facedrive is after just a few minutes of thoughtful consideration. The fact that there are no viable options for making money off of this error is the real punchline to this joke. It does not happen very often that the actions of a short seller will determine the future of a respectable company. In spite of the fact that one of their websites includes the phrase “do business with Facedrive,” I would advise against engaging in any transactions with the company.
Since I began writing this blog, I have picked up a few tidbits of information regarding “shady” stock promoters. On the other hand, I haven’t recorded them just yet because I believe them to be nothing more than dog-on-man tales.
People who engage in short selling, activists, people who write newsletters, and the Federal Reserve. The functioning of the stock market and business in general includes all of these components. The statement made by Fergie that “big girls don’t cry” is absolutely correct.
Read more here.
