The Premium That Bought Nothing: When ATE Insurance Doesn’t Pay £19.5M of after-the-event premiums bought policies that never paid out on a single claim, and the funder whose money paid for them is now suing the insurer to get them back. In the same month, seven claimants learned that their £16.2M of the same cover […]
The Patent Platform Turn: How Families Beat Single Cases Funders moved from single patents to families and licensing campaigns, and the strategy is genuinely better than what I bought as a retail investor. But the thing that actually repriced patent assets over the last eighteen months wasn’t strategy at all. It was a screen at […]
The VC Myth, Debunked: Why Patent Funders Aren’t VCs A defence firm says patent funders bankroll junk in the hope one case pays for everything. A funder’s general counsel says the arithmetic makes that impossible. I rebuilt his model and it reconciles to the dollar — so he wins. Then I read what he deliberately […]
The Verdict That Vanished: Inside the “Take Care of Maya” Funding Fight A $213M verdict became a $42M loan and a $60M insurance policy. Then an appeals court erased the judgment and sent the case back for a smaller retrial — the one outcome that breaks the economics while triggering none of the protection. Florida’s […]
The $10M Extraction: Anatomy of a Subordinate Note A retail real estate offering promises 11.5% on a loan against a Santa Monica building anchored by Trader Joe’s. The 27-page note supplement describes something narrower: the first-loss slice of that loan, behind a bank, with cure rights that can require investors to pay the bank down. […]
YieldStreet → Willow Wealth: Anatomy of a Rebrand $208 million of investor losses, a name change seven weeks after the second exposé, and a decade of performance data pulled from the website. The rebrand is what everyone noticed. The SEC filings describe something larger, and the company states it plainly in its own proxy material: […]
The Template Behind the Ban: Tracing HB 105 to Its Source Most of the state litigation-funding bills in this wave descend from one model act adopted by insurance-committee legislators in November 2024. Lay the template beside the statutes and something odd shows up: the document is called a Transparency Act, and transparency is the part […]
The Ban That Wasn’t: Ohio’s New Litigation-Funding Law Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed HB 105 in July and the coverage called it a foreign-funder ban. It isn’t one. It’s a licensing regime for the whole industry with a single real prohibition attached — and that prohibition, a look-through test on where a fund’s capital came […]
The Coupon That Couldn’t Wait: Woodville and the Fixed-Date Trap A UK litigation funder just collapsed with a £249M loan book, 300,000 claims, and about ten employees. It didn’t lose the cases — the cases haven’t finished. It promised investors fixed quarterly interest and fixed repayment dates on an asset that pays whenever a court […]
The Redemption Panic: Why BDC Gates Aren’t Defaults Non-traded BDCs are capping withdrawals again and the alarm is pointed at the wrong thing. The cap is the most honest sentence in the prospectus. The price it lets you exit at is set by the party you’re exiting, on a quarter’s lag, and cannot be audited […]
The Bank That Isn’t a Bank: Synapse and the FDIC Mirage No bank failed, so deposit insurance never paid a cent — and 100,000+ people still lost access to their money. Here’s what actually went missing, why the compensation arrived as a one-dollar penalty, and why the two rules meant to fix this still don’t […]
How “Senior Secured” Became Subordinated Scraps A $15M “senior secured” loan to a class action law firm — how I lost $87,723, and what the offering documents said before I lost it This is the most expensive lesson in my portfolio and the one I link back to most often, so I’ll put the takeaway […]
The Extended Hold: A 16-Month Deal That Ran 45 A merchant cash advance portfolio took nearly four years to pay 12.82% — and the thing that saved it was printed on page one all along My third YieldStreet investment — $70,000 into a portfolio of merchant cash advances — funded in April 2018 on a […]
