A Change Of Perspective

"Woe betide thee, who has a desk move imposed upon them and loses a spectacular City window view and privacy, to face an office cupboard with a sign reading 'Restricted Access Area' while surrounded by irritating colleagues on all sides"  The Emerging Investor

Having been pulled onto this tedious Hedge Fund confidence-boosting initiative at the bank, I was duly forced to move desks to sit with the new team this week. Quite why is beyond me, as I was only sitting about 20 yards away from them before, and in this digital age we mostly communicate through email, communicator and conference calls anyway.

The bank being as tight as it is, rather than paying for the desk/equipment movers to come in, they left it to me to spend 1.5hrs crawling around on my hands and knees to unplug and switch PC's - all while avoiding the mouse traps down under the desks (we have a problem with rodents - both human and otherwise).

I'm mostly not pleased because I was happily working on my site on the quiet at work as I haven't been too busy recently, and the wireframes for the Functional Spec are rather too visible to pass as financial work.  Now I might even have to do some work for my money at this rate.

Anyway it's not all bad news, as the actual site design has been progressing very well, and I am confident that within the next week or so I will have it sufficiently completed to approach vendors.  They are in for a grilling given that part of my daily job is managing incompetence, and I expect nothing less from them with the build.

There is nothing of interest happening yet regarding GGP, besides Vornado being confirmed as a major potential front runner in buying any GGP assets put up for sale, and having raised sufficient capital to make reasonable offers.  Also following on from my last post regarding GGP including CMBS subsidiaries in its Chapter 11 filing, which has major ramifications for the credit markets; unsurprisingly a challenge is being mounted by one of the groups who would be adversely impacted.

The creditor meeting in a fortnight from now should prove interesting, but this is going to be a slow, lengthy process in which patience is the biggest strength any investor can show.

Next time I am going to move back to investing, which will be especially useful for those interested in shorting. It is a question I have been asked by several people recently, and is actually much easier than you would think. Anybody with a standard broker account can do it today, and I will outline how and some of the options.