Whilst I'm obviously sorry for those who have lost money on BLA...

Whilst I'm obviously sorry for those who have lost money on BLA and also for some of the people that I know who work there who I like to think have done nothing wrong, I take a somewhat different point of view on this.

I agree that the Glaucus report was definitely not 100% correct and did have some factual errors, but they did point out some fundamental flaws in BLA's business model that had gone unnoticed up to this point. Diogenes Research actually pointed out some of the issues at the end of 2016 but as I understand it were shut down by the threat of litigation.

The parallel that I would draw would be companies like BIG and GSW that ramped their share prices and raised capital based upon announcements about new contracts, partnerships etc. that amounted to far less than they purported to be. Whilst not quite as bad, BLA's equivalent about this was announcements about continually increasing AUM, institutional mandates etc. that turned out either to be not calculated in a market standard manner or not quite fee earning as they appeared to be. The lack of disclosure around the makeup of this AUM was the misleading thing IMO as it meant those announcements created unjustified hype on the back of which BLA raised capital.

As I have said before, an investment business is fundamentally based upon trust, and what Glaucus have done is to call that trust into question. Whether or not BLA survive in their current form will fundamentally depend on their ability to source attractive new investment opportunities and find investors for them. Time will tell whether this occurs or not but from my perspective the odds don't look that great.