Halkin Events

Halkin is very pleased to welcome back Mike Orme, co-founder of the advisory Signum Intel, Mike will:

• Set the scene with profiles of Sam Altman of OpenAI and Liang Wenfeng of DeepMind
• Explain why the parallels with the dot-com era are inexact
• Discuss the threat of China Inc flooding the world market with cheap AI that’s 80-90% as good as prestige US offerings
• Consider whether the vast capex on US AI data centers will prove justified?
• Suggest investment opportunities in data center power and cooling infrastructures and in embodied AI rather than cloud based GPT.

Mike Orme has been a technology forecaster and analyst for 40 years, armed with a strong aversion to hype and hand-waving. Left field is his natural habitat. He worked directly with Steve Jobs and Andy Grove on projects while at the legendary Silicon Valley consultancy Regis McKenna, broke the story on the BBC behind the collapse of the Japanese 5th Generation Computer project, spent nearly a decade as a global consultant at HP, helped companies spun out from Cambridge University find start-up capital, headed up technology research at Centrum and Mirabeau, and worked closely with Cyrus Mewawalla at CM Research. Mike also founded the Signum Intel advisory for global fund managers and wrote one of the first books on the semiconductor revolution: Micros: A Pervasive Force.

His career spans many roles, including Secretary of the joint Treasury/Bank of England Home Finance Committee; Private Client portfolio manager at leading City stockbrokers – Kitcat & Aitken and J&A Scrimgeour (now long absorbed into investment banks); Mr Bearbull at the Investors Chronicle; Editor, Technology Magazine; Head of Regis McKenna (UK) – working with Apple, Intel and HP among others; Associate partner, Peat Marwick – when it acquired Regis McKenna (Europe); Market relations/analyst relations consultant, HP (Europe); Co-founder/Director, Blue Sky Forum linking Oxbridge spin-outs to business angels and VCs; PR strategist, Apama Ltd (now part of Progress Software); Global strategist, Westhall Capital (London) – produced monthly briefing, Peripheral Vision, for FMs and ran frequent brain-storming sessions with Westhall clients in the UK and Asia; Global strategist, Centrum Capital (Mumbai, London). Produced monthly briefing, Mind Over Mania, and ran frequent brain-storming sessions with Centrum’s Indian clients; Freelance analyst providing in camera briefings to large global fund managers, as well as developing ‘Inside Track Ltd’ in Kenya to offer PE to East African ventures.

Alasdair Macleod started his career as a stockbroker in 1970 on the London Stock Exchange. Within nine years, he had risen to become senior partner of his firm. Subsequently, he held positions at director level in investment management and worked as a mutual fund manager. Alasdair also worked at a bank in Guernsey as an executive director.

On returning to the UK he became head of research for Goldmoney, a position he held until last year. He left to found his own Substack channel (MacleodFinance.com), where he writes on economics, geopolitics, money, and credit.

For most of his 40 years in the finance industry, Alasdair has been demystifying macro-economic events for his investing clients. The accumulation of this experience has convinced him that unsound monetary policies are the most destructive weapon governments use against the common man. Accordingly, his mission is to educate and inform the public in layman’s terms about what governments do with money and how to protect themselves from the consequences.

Please join us for Rob Marstrand’s evaluation of the Milei policy revolution in Argentina.

Robert Marstrand, who has lived in Argentina for the last seventeen years is an investment analyst and founder of OfWealth.

Rob spent 15 years at UBS Group, having joined predecessor firm S.G. Warburg as a graduate trainee in 1993. He specialised in the bank’s own global strategy across all business divisions and regions, at different times based in London, Zurich and Hong Kong. This involved general business strategy (usually expansion), competitor analysis, and M&A / joint ventures, including a later specialisation in the Asia-Pacific region (especially China). With the Global Financial Crisis gathering steam in early 2008, he escaped to South America (Buenos Aires). Part of the rationale was that Europe (including the UK) was in long-term decline, and that Argentina was probably past the worst. Rob believes that he was correct on the first point, but at least 15 years too early on the second point. Given that Argentina is a financial backwater, nowadays Rob writes independently about finance and investment, for an international audience, at ofwealth.substack.com