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The amount of work that goes into a follow-on offering prior to the road show is mind boggling—there is a huge team that supports this entire process, from the accounting department to the marketing department to the business units, legal department, and so on. The road show itself usually lasts from between five to twelve working days and, for a company based in the US, may cover just the US or Canada and Europe as well. The process usually begins with a kick-off meeting where executives discuss the story of the company in front of the sales force of the bank that is representing them. The banks are generally experts at raising funds—they know which side of the street to go to a...

One of the events that occurs in the life of a public company is a road show. The road show is one of the essential steps that lead up to the company’s IPO (initial public offering). When a company offers its securities for purchase in the public market, the management team goes on a multi-city tour to meet with potential investors and show them the business plan, and also to garner feedback on what the market response to the stock offering is likely to be. If the company is already public, but requires capital to fuel further growth either by acquisitions or expansion of the existing company, then it goes through a follow-on offering. The follow-on offering is a highly complex process...

Another way of thinking about this is from an investment perspective. Are you investing money in the stock markets in your own country, or are you buying government bonds or simply saving your money in a savings account? Have you thought about possibly investing in stock markets in other countries? Have you thought about spreading your risk? If you live in the US, what does your 401k plan look like? Have you put it in international funds so as to diversify your risk and to take advantages of global opportunities currently available? The third way would be to think of it from the point of view of education. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the knowledge of humanity is expanding at an unpre...

I have been discussing various aspects of globalization, as viewed through different lenses. Another lens that you could view it through would be the personal one, by asking the questions: “How does all this affect me? How can I protect myself in this environment?” Here are a few ways in which one could look at it. One of the first things to do is to think about it in terms of where you are with respect to the global divides—what side of the divides are you on? The divide where the gap is the largest and is dramatically increasing every day is the one between the haves and the have-nots. Even if you are on the right side of the divide, you will see that the difference betwe...

The final lens is the economic one. Let’s examine this from a bit of a historical perspective. If we went back a century in time, the second most powerful person on earth was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in England. He was essentially the person who controlled the wealth of the British Empire and thus obviously wielded great influence. Less than a hundred years later, you have an individual like George Soros who holds no such office, but is able to influence the financial markets, bring down the pound, and in the process make billions of dollars. He does the same thing with the Thai baht, but this goes relatively unnoticed because it is a much weaker currency. For someone to be abl...