Knowing your ABC
The Blind Squirrel's 'Monday' Morning Notes. Year 4; First FULL week of 2026.
Knowing your ABC
I may claim a furry exterior, but this weekend’s edition of Blind Squirrel Macro is NOT brought to you by the cast of Sesame Street. It is, however, brought to you by the letters A,B & C.
While, sitting in my City of London office in the early summer of 2010, your 🐿️ was suffering from severe case of FOMO. ABC was ringing in my head. A capital markets banker thrives on being in the thick of the action. The post-GFC world of European ECM activity could hardly have been described as a feeding frenzy.
I was trying to keep myself busy with a more-junior-than-hoped-for syndicate role on the £200m LSE IPO of Ocado (OCDO:LN). My consumer sector coverage banker had quit to join the online food retailer as CFO just ahead of the announcement of the team sheet. It was one of those years.
To make matters worse, on the other side of the world, my friends and former colleagues in Hong Kong were printing deal tickets about 75 times the size. The IPO of the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC!) was raising $19.2bn from global investors, including a group of ‘cornerstone’ investing corporates, sovereign wealth funds and HK tycoons taking down a cool $5.45 billion of stock between themselves.
ABC was not a one-off. There were literally dozens of multi-billion dollar deals in the pipeline for Asia, including the IPO of insurance giant AIA (1299.HK) - a sale of secondary shares by AIG to repay its Federal Reserve Bank of New York rescue loan dating from the GFC. I’d seen enough. 4 months later, I was back in Hong Kong allocating those very AIA shares.
[A]lpha, [B]eta and [C]hina
The process of reviewing of the 🐿️’s BUSHY™ ‘beta’ portfolio at year-end got me thinking. Last week, I focused on my positioning in Latin America. I concluded that I was comfortable with BUSHY™’s regional LatAm overweight position relative to our Vanguard ‘Target Date’ benchmark.
