Halter: Hi-tech herding
Many fans of Taylor Sheridan’s mighty Yellowstone universe may have entertained a dream of chucking in the urban existence, sticking on an enormous hat and buying a ranch in Montana.
The dream tends to evaporate quite fast with the realisation that the lifestyle is not so much strolling through beautiful pastures in the sunshine before heading back to the homestead to entertain buckle bunnies and barrel racers, but more like extremely hard work at all hours in all weathers for money that looks more like a tip than a salary.
This is the problem that New Zealand’s agtech unicorn Halter is addressing for cattle farmers everywhere, applying advanced technology to a historically conservative industry to allow John Dutton wannabes to do much of the hard work from the comfort of their stoep. Halter’s technology combines solar-powered collars on the bovines with in-pasture towers to collect data from the grazing cattle that feeds into its proprietary “Cowgorithm” and then to the farmer’s app.
Halter creates a digital map of a farm, allowing the farmer to erect virtual fences and analyse the condition of the pasture, while the collars vibrate or play audio cues that let the cows know when it’s time to move location or when they’ve stepped out of a predetermined area.
So far the company has drawn more than 620,000 miles (almost a million km) of virtual fences and has about 600,000 cows wearing their collars, and it has just raised $220m at a valuation of $2bn in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. It may not be the Yellowstone way, but it may be the future.
Caxton Associates: Trump tweets tank fund
Spare a thought and play a tiny violin for all those not-so-poor traders trying to make an honest living in the age of Trump.
Caxton is a veteran of the hedge-fund sector, founded by Bruce Kovner all the way back in 1983, so it has seen a few booms and busts in its time. It proved its ability to react to unknown unknowns in the Covid epidemic, with its flagship Global Macro fund doing 39.6% in 2020 while many other investors floundered in the wake of an unprecedented global shutdown.
Its goal is “to deliver consistent absolute returns for our investors irrespective of the market environment”. Its Global Macro fund is reported to have managed 14% last year, but the chaos in the Middle East has wiped that out with a loss of 15% so far in March.
The difficulty with pursuing a Global Macro strategy is that you tend to rely on rigorous analysis and an underlying presumption that major global players will act within generally rational parameters, rather than the current post-truth situation where markets appear to be reacting to whatever garbage is broadcast on a whim on Truth Social.
Clearly the big winners at the moment are the soothsayers who are making fortunes by trading moments before an attack or a pronouncement that is likely to send the oil market tumbling or flying.
The whole thing smells fishier than Billingsgate on a hot summer’s afternoon, and it’s hard not to imagine that the inner circle is popping out from the Oval Office or the Pentagon to sort out their retirement funds.
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