strongFinancial News/strongbr /br /Jason Corcoran in Moscow br /28 November 2008 br /br /br /Swedish fund manager East Capital has cut its personnel by a fifth following a 70% slide in its core equity market of Russia over the past two months.br /br /The 40 jobs cuts from East Capital's overall headcount of 225 indicate how the financial crisis in Russia is spreading from investment banks to the buyside. br /br /The Stockholm-based manager said 20 jobs in Sweden would be affected and the remainder in its international offices in Moscow and elsewhere in the CIS. br /br /A statement from East Capital said: "Like many others in these turbulent times, we are carrying out an organisational review…We need to adapt to the new reality."br /br /Hedge funds operating throughout Russia and the CIS are cutting their headcounts and slashing costs following sharp falls in equity prices and increases ...

Gazprom’s bid to become the major shareholder in Repsol, Spain’s biggest oil company, has made the Spanish finance minister ‘uncomfortable’, and according to this earlier report, the offer has already been rejected. The EU is still trying to manage its dependence on Russia for energy security. The US has criticized Russia’s European energy projects, saying that the South Stream gas project is too expensive and difficult to build. VTB has financed a loan for Stockholm-listed West Siberian Resources to help it modernize. KazMunaiGaz is in talks with Transneft to increase its holding in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, having been surprised to find that Oman had sold the 7% stake it had initially wanted to buy. Gazprom is looking on the bright side of the financial crisis, suggesting that conditions could cut building costs. Read The Economist on ...

Warren Buffett says buy. Jeremy Grantham says it will get worse. Both are celebrated value investors. Who is right? It all depends upon your view of the third derivative of investing. Today we look at valuations in the stock market. This is the second part of a speech I have given in the past few weeks in California and Stockholm. I am updating the numbers, as the target keeps moving. 

While from one perspective things look rather difficult, from another there is a ray of hope. What can you expect to earn from stocks over the next five years? It should make for an interesting letter. Note: this will be a little longer than usual, but part of it is there are a LOT of charts.

I likened this to the economic situation we are in now. With consumer spending “resetting” to a new lower level, we are going to have to

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Emerging MarketsEmerging Markets - InvestmentsEmerging market investing started to take off when in the mid-1980s when the International Finance Corporation (IFC) set up the first mutual fund that invested solely in securities from emerging markets with a seed capital of around $50 million. Since 2002, assets managed by emerging market hedge funds have increased fourfold and in the first quarter of 2008, they managed approximately $110 billion, according to HFR.Emerging market hedge funds are defined by the markets they operate in and not the strategies they follow. Thus, these funds are quite heterogeneous and adopt a variety of strategies such as equity long/short, event driven, global macro and fixed income arbitrage.Emerging markets are defined quite broadly. Morgan Stanley describes an emerging market, as ...