Evil Diaries: On the treadmill

Those who promote investment in Bitcoin try to persuade listeners that holders of Bitcoin are safe with their own password as a secure means of protecting their wealth from anybody. However, the Feds have moved in and recovered $4.5bn of Bitcoin owned (or, shall we say, held) by the Crocodile of Wall Street and RazzleKhan (his wife) when such a move was rated impossible. Well I never.

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Warren Buffett remarked a long time ago that when a new CEO takes charge of a failing company it is the reputation of the latter that wins out. I suspect that this will prove the case at Peloton (PTON). I closed my short at $22 and trousered a healthy yield only to reopen at $25. And then bid rumours got floated around such that PTON moved the founding CEO up to chairman with an existing member of staff installed as CEO. There is no bid and no sign of one hovers in the background. PTON has recovered to a startling $37 and looks a stone cold short to me. It’s the shareholders as well as the customers who are on a treadmill.

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I remember Bamber Gascoigne’s father. He was a director of Tanganyika Concessions (affectionately known as Tanks) whose headquarters were in Gresham House and where I as part of a team of four called over the shareholder registered to check it with the dividend warrants (this was a crashingly boring job lasting three weeks). Tanks operated the Benguela railway which ran from the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt over to Benguela on the coast of Angola. Autres temps, autres moeurs.