Bad Celebrity Investments

I was appointed the finance correspondent for Senior Life Advisor, an online magazine for investors near or in retirement. The articles for Senior Life Advisor were designed to offer actionable information as well as items of interest about economics, investing and personal finance.

Being famous does not insulate you from losing money on bad investments. In fact, it may increase their chances since they are a bigger target for scam artists.

Bono lost $140 million on an investment in PalmPilots. Remember, bad tech investments could happen to U2.

Mark Twain saw the future in an automated typesetting machine called the Paige Compositor, but lost $150,000 — about $5 million in today’s dollars. He was bankrupt at 59.

Dorothy Hamill, skating darling of the 1976 Olympics earned the then unheard of $1 million annual contract with the Ice Capades. When the show ran into trouble, Hamill bought it out of bankruptcy, but two years later, she hung up her skates and unloaded the show.

Amazon Summits A Dow That No Longer Exists

The addition of Amazon to the Dow with Walgreen’s unceremonious deletion, and the Dow’s current composition tells it like it

Financial Institutions Feeling the Crunch in Countdown to CECL Implementation

I was retained by Big Four accounting and consulting firm KPMG to assist them in their thought leadership efforts centered on changing accounting regulations. In this case, the Financial Accounting Standards Board or FASB had instituted new rules on the measurement of current and expected credit losses, i.e. CECL, that would require massive reorganization of financial reporting for the largest financial services organizations in the world. This thought leadership piece concerned the results of a survey among C-suite executives about their state of preparedness in the final countdown to the CECL implementation.

Securitizing Structured Settlement Payment Streams: A Primer

Fall 2012. This article was written with Stefano Sola and Phil Donahue, executives at JGWPT Holdings. We were engaged by JGWPT to assist them
in publishing the article below for The Journal Of Structured Finance.

Is The Media Biased?

This story is from our February 2024 update newsletter that offers communications insights, and hopefully, some amusing diversion.

David R. Evanson, LLC David R. Evanson, LLC