Hi longreach …. Well I just started to look to be honest,...

Hi longreach …. Well I just started to look to be honest, despite knowing @Saragian has been following with his mostly impeccably reliable charts for a while …

So I’ll share a bit as I go …and no doubt you guys are already well over this but maybe sticking some stories and posts in will be helpful for other  ‘newbies’ or elicit some helpful information from others who are wiser..
And I like research …even if it leads me off track
cheers

What Mark Carnegie said in November 2021 about EBR

Spoiler : Here

https://www.afr. com/companies/healthcare-and-fitness/this-could-be-as-big-as-cochlear-carnegie-20211122-p59ayb
This could be as big as Cochlear’: Carnegie
Carrie LaFrenzSenior reporter
Updated Nov 22, 2021 – 5.20pm, first published at 4.24pm

Investor Mark Carnegie believes cardiovascular medical device company EBR Systems, which hits the big board on Wednesday, will be the next Cochlear and change lives around the world.
Silicon Valley-based EBR was founded in 2003 and developed the WiSE Cardiac resynchronisation therapy system, which uses proprietary wireless technology to deliver pacing stimulation directly to the inside of the left ventricle of the heart.

Mark Carnegie’ is a long-time backer of EBR Systems, which hits the ASX Wednesday with a market value of about $344 million based on its IPO price.  Edwina Pickles
The WiSE system is the world’s first and only inside-the-heart pacing system for heart failure.
Mr Carnegie told The Australian Financial Review the investment has been “close to his heart and chequebook” since he initially invested three years ago in the pioneering leadless pace-making technology.
“My daughter is profoundly deaf, and has a Cochlear implant. So, I’ve seen the life outcome impact, that is absolutely extraordinary,” said the venture capitalist.
“This could be as big as Cochlear. I genuinely think that. They’ve got a few things on the horizon to sort out, but you could take 10 times the addressable market. These leads kill people – this leadless solution is a big deal.”
Mr Carnegie said he had been stalking this company for three or four years before making his initial $40 million investment.
M.H. Carnegie’s medical device partner, Trevor Moody, first knew of EBR a decade ago while working at Frazier Healthcare Ventures and introduced it to Mr Carnegie.
Size of a rice grain

EBR will have a market value of about $344 million based on its $1.08 a share IPO price.
The business is backed by M.H. Carnegie & Co, Brandon Capital and big super funds AustralianSuper, Hesta and Hostplus. In October, EBR raised $110 million, with present investors chipping in more than $30 million of the funds raised.

New investors supporting the latest capital raise include TelstraSuper, private investment manager Mason Stevens and pioneer of the Australian venture capital sector, Bill Ferris.
The new funds will be used to complete the company’s pivotal Phase III clinical trial and US regulatory application, and to support the commercialisation of its WiSE technology in the US and select markets, including Australia.
Chris Nave, founding partner of Brandon Capital, manager of the Medical Research Commercialisation Fund, said the cardiology technology is one of the most exciting in development.

“EBR’s early clinical data is very promising, and for those heart failure patients not able to receive traditional cardiac resynchronisation therapy [CRT], it is life changing: the difference between living a normal life as opposed to being constantly short of breath, often housebound and unable to perform simple daily tasks,” Dr Nave said.
“EBR’s highly experienced management team come with significant commercialisation success in medical devices and cardiology. This listing is great news for Australian heart failure patients and investors alike.”

EBR’s chairman is Allan Will, a former chairman of Ardian, which was acquired by US-listed giant, Medtronic, for more than $US800 million in 2020.
More than 350 people have been implanted with this device that is the size of a cooked grain of rice, has no battery in the heart and is powered with transmitters just below the skin.
Northern California-based chief executive John McCutcheon believes the initial CRT market opportunity is $US2.1 billion ($2.9 billion), but longer term is eyeing the $US8 billion-plus general pacemaker market dominated by $US157 billion Medtronic.
“There’s enough market potential that we’ll be growing for quite some time,” he said. “We will be a very rapid growth medtech company. We have got an opportunity to expand indications into the CRM market [cardiac rhythm management] longer term.”
The WiSE system is approved for use in Europe, and for research procedures in the US and Australia. Mr McCutcheon said since EBR has breakthrough device designation in the US, the regulator will fast-track the process to full approval.
EBR is halfway through its Phase III study and is targeting US regulatory approval and a US commercial launch in the second half of 2023.
Australia has a strong history in the evolution of pacemaker technology, with Dr Mark Lidwell building the world’s first pacemaker and successfully using it to resuscitate a newborn infant in 1929. In 1963, an Australian pacemaker company, Telectronics, designed many of the features of transvenous leads and pulse generators.
Mr Carnegie said after more than a decade of developing the complex technology, and dealing with regulatory submissions, the group is now on the cusp of bringing the device into the mainstream.

Who is Mark Carnegie anyway?
When I started reading the story in the spoiler  below, also in the AFR and written just three months later, I remembered I had read about Mark,  the British aristocratic ex-girlfriend and the NZ utopia in relation to a big movers and shakers shindig in Sydney some time ago ..
By the time I had finished the story quite distracted me from the fact he is a big investor in EBR …
Is he still?
And what about all those other pre IPO names, and the management?

Interesting Sunday read on Mark in 2022

Spoiler : Mark Carnegie AFR 23/02/2022

https://www.afr. com/wealth/people/mark-carnegie-on-why-blockchain-needs-to-be-part-of-your-life-20211214-p59hfy

• Wealth
• People

Mark Carnegie, a visionary narcissist, almost drowned in Africa

Sure bitcoin’s a bubble, says the venture capitalist. But unlike the rest of your portfolio, it’s on the right side of an epochal shift in finance. From the upcoming March issue out on February 25.
Aaron PatrickSenior correspondent
Feb 23, 2022 – 10.52am

“I don’t want to look like a f---ing narcissist,” Mark Carnegie says. “Well, the truth is I am a f---ing narcissist; I just don’t want to sound like one.”
Close friends – there aren’t many – call him Cargs.
It isn’t easy to categorise the 60-year-old bachelor. Labels he doesn’t dispute include venture capitalist, philanthropist, pseudo-intellectual, hunter, devoted father, failed husband, loudmouth, attention-seeker, egotist.
At this moment, though, he’s a man in need of laundry.
As we speak, Carnegie is feeling the pressure of an impending photography shoot to run with this feature. A pressed jacket and shirt has become a matter of life and death. Reception at the Ritz-Carlton Singapore, his new home, isn’t operating at Carnegie speed. “I have been calling since seven in the morning,” he tells a clerk. “Nobody answered. I need it, existentially, by one.”

Carnegie at a hawker centre in Singapore: “Until sensible regulation comes, the level of bad behaviour in this sector will be out of control.” Franz Navarrete

At the pandemic’s beginning, Carnegie moved from an avant-garde plastic-walled apartment within an old Sydney church to the Golden Bay region at the north end of New Zealand’s south island.
He settled into semi-retirement on 89 hectares of ocean-view, river-crossed land with his girlfriend, Katie Percy, an English aristocrat. (Pippa Middleton, sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, attended Lady Percy’s 2011 wedding to British financier Patrick Valentine, a marriage that lasted three years.)
Like Carnegie, she was attracted to the bohemian local vibe and plentiful deer and goats, which they hunted down, killed and ate. Weary of guns, Carnegie eventually switched to hunting with bows and arrows, a shift driven by latent sympathies and a romantic sense of manhood. “I wanted a fairer contest,” he says.

As members of the British-Australian establishment, the couple unburdened themselves from the expectations of conventional life. After growing up in a castle used in the Harry Potter films, Lady Percy became a mechanic, race car driver and gunsmith.

With Carnegie, no topic is off limits. Talking about his private life, though, is uncomfortable, for both of us. He has three daughters with Tanya Nelson Carnegie, an investor and social entrepreneur. “It was really hard for a long time,” he says. “Then I met a girl. I came out of a divorce and found somebody who wanted to travel the world and do a lot of fun stuff. My kids were in uni and out of school, which took away a big chunk of parenting responsibility.“
Alas, Carnegie and Percy’s relationship didn’t survive the pandemic. Six months ago, in search of a new life, he emerged from semi-retirement and relocated to Singapore.

Carnegie has agreed to briefly cover his personal life as an entree to what he really wants to talk about: convincing Australians to treat cryptocurrencies and the blockchain like the economy-transforming technologies he says they are.


At the same time as he decamped for Singapore, Carnegie went from crypto sceptic to high-profile cheerleader. He became Australia’s most forceful advocate for a national cryptocurrency strategy. He accused regulators of lacking the vision to understand this financial innovation, and claimed every Australian saver had lost out because of “the collective decision of their [fund] managers to thumb-suck – like me – on an emerging asset class”.
Carnegie speaks with the wild intensity of a man determined to change the world, and with the self-awareness of how outlandish his predictions are.
“I sound like some kind of utopian here or some religious convert,” he admits. Central to his message is that distributed-ledger technology – the technical term for blockchains – is “unequivocally” a significant and positive force for society. “This is an opportunity to take back control from monopolists,” he says.

If the government legalises exchange trading by the end of this financial year, Carnegie promises to hold a party for the entire industry at Bondi Icebergs. Franz Navarrete


It’s a technology that will break the power of tech oligopolies and empower citizen democracy.
It might even stop 12-year-old girls being sold into marriage in Barotseland, an unrecognised African kingdom near where Carnegie almost died.
A lot of wealth could be up for grabs

When it comes to the blockchain, many have promised much.
The technological blueprint behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is, they say, a much-needed hedge against inflation. It can make global finance fairer. It can guarantee contracts, improve commercial trust, curb the power of social networks, protect private property, online privacy and human rights, and – this is the important bit – generate a lot of wealth.

We’re talking 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the global economy. Wealth beyond Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. If Carnegie and others are right, the forces unleashed will be as economically powerful as the steam engine, railways, electricity and the personal computer. Society will be richer, fairer, better.

The economic exploitation of blockchain-dependent commerce is known as Web 3.0 (or Web3), the latest iteration of digital development. Web 1.0 began with the first web page in 1991, which inspired static websites that made information accessible to anyone with a modem. Web 2.0 marked the rise of social media, which led to the exploitation of our most personal details by tech giants.
We’re not more than 10 per cent into the next phase, Web 3.0, according to Carnegie. Its potential is unclear and unrealised. Carnegie tries to explain it, but I struggle to understand. He sends me links to podcasts, which are fascinating but so conceptual that it is difficult to nail down what they’re talking about.


At its most simple level, Web 3.0 means an online system that is free from governments and where everything can be done without the need of big tech or, when it comes to moving money, the banks.
It encapsulates a world where traders can create “smart contracts” that automatically transfer funds as soon as whatever is being traded hits a given price. Artists can sell digital artworks as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and can set the terms of the sale so that they automatically receive a royalty each time their artwork is resold.
There was a particularly creative use for the blockchain in 2020 when a 23-year-old Frenchman, Alex Masmej, “tokenised” himself, raising $US20,000 from investors who in turn get to vote on his life choices and ultimately share in whatever income he earns.
It’s an idea that some believe could create a new business model for tomorrow’s celebrities. Instead of signing to a record label, an up-and-coming singer could raise funds directly from fans who would, in turn, own a sliver of all the income they later make.
“If you’re creative in Web 2.0 you are a serf,” Carnegie says. “You can’t own the product of your own labour because you have to deal with monopolists like Facebook and Snap. The economic balance of power is profoundly unfair. It’s not like that for the creators in Web 3.0. You will find those fans. They will want to have a one-to-one connection with you. This is an opportunity for interest groups to take back control from monopolists. Web 3.0 is why I am full-time employed again.”
A radical path

I admit to Carnegie I’m not a believer. In late 2019, I wrote two sceptical articles about a Perth blockchain start-up that promised to revolutionise electricity trading, Power Ledger. The co-owner, Jemma Green, sued for defamation and won, even though Power Ledger didn’t make any operating profits in the first five years of its existence, and doesn’t predict any in the next three. The joke seemed to be on me.
Carnegie is sympathetic. His faith isn’t unconditional. He tells investors to limit investments in crypto assets to 5 per cent of their portfolios. “The truth is, it’s a bubble,” he says. “These things are insanely overpriced. Do not hear my evangelism as a recommendation to go beyond a modest allocation of your savings.“
At the same time, he argues blockchain technology is a force for good. He invokes the leading figure of modern economic development, Muhammad Yunus. The social entrepreneur’s Grameen Bank pioneered microfinance in 1983, lending small amounts to impoverished Bangladeshi women, who proved to be more reliable creditors than many would-be billionaires.
Blockchain technology offers a modern equivalent, Carnegie argues. He later emails me with advice for any young entrepreneurs who want to follow him. “Realise this is far more about your labour than your capital,” he says. “You spend two to three hours a day on social media, and you are a slave to the monoliths. Take your time back and invest in finding your 1000 true fans in Web 3.0.“
Just like the women who received Grameen’s microloans to buy a cow and create an income stream for their family, a disintermediated finance system allows people to raise capital, borrow money and transact with customers, all on their terms. “The Web 3.0 economy is not resource constrained,” Carnegie says. “What is determined to be valuable is going to be determined by the strength of the various communities during the hard times coming.”

It is a radical path for a man raised among Australia’s business establishment. Carnegie’s father, Roderick, founded the McKinsey & Co consulting business in Australia, and became managing director of CRA, now Rio Tinto, in 1974. A sister-in-law, Maile, runs technology at the ANZ Banking Group. Brother James is the local representative of Blackstone US private equity group.
Carnegie himself has a science degree from Melbourne University, studied jurisprudence at Oxford, entered the world of private equity, and went into business with John Wylie and John Singleton. Neither relationship ended well. Wylie, who also runs an unconventional investment firm, Tanarra, last month described cryptocurrencies as a classic late-stage excess that depends “almost entirely on a pass-the-parcel investor mindset and the maintenance of collective investor belief”. Ouch.

Carnegie at the Ritz-Carlton Singapore. Franz Navarrete

Ten years ago, when Carnegie turned 50, he began hosting dinner parties to discuss great works of literature to broaden himself intellectually. The final book club was held last year at Sydney’s National Art School, where 200 guests took part in a Middle Ages-inspired banquet.
Young actors performed scenes from Romeo and Juliet. Carnegie’s oldest friend, Melbourne philosopher and teacher Robert Leach, led a discussion of the play’s merits. “I’ve been fortunate in life,” Carnegie told the room, “and I’d like to share some of that good fortune.”
Betting on bitcoin

Carnegie and his Russian-Australian business partner, Sergei Sergienko, own a nascent crypto investment bank, MHC Digital Finance. Last year they created two investment funds to buy shares in Web 3.0 companies. They hold bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for investors to ensure they aren’t stolen.
They’re working on a quasi-crypto stock exchange, known as an over-the-counter market, for institutional investors. The Digital Asset Fund, which started with private investments by Carnegie and Sergienko, uses futures and options to bet on the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
“We can give you 70 per cent of the upside and 40 per cent of the downside,” Carnegie says. Its assets include a stake – he says it’s worth several hundred million dollars – in Crypto Gaming United, which provides credit to players in a play-to-earn computer game called Axie Infinity.


It’s insanely popular across south-east Asia, where people use it to learn English while earning crypto. To the outsider it looks a bit like Pokémon, but to Carnegie it’s a workforce management and microlending business.
“People want work, they will respond to any jobs that can be done on a shitty smartphone with poor Wi-Fi. The question is what are those jobs going to be?“
Their Market Neutral Strategy Fund exploits gaps in cryptocurrency prices created by amateur traders to make money whether bitcoin prices rise or fall. They claim returns of at least 15 per cent even if prices fall. Last November, the price of bitcoin hit almost $88,000, although at the time of publishing it was bouncing around $52,000.
If bitcoin is a bubble, it’s not alone, according to Carnegie. “So are the fintech stocks and all the tech stocks,” he says, “and so is Australian real estate. All those bubbles got inflated simultaneously by governments. Because we recovered from the 2008 financial bubble, people think there is no downside. They’re wrong.”

Young Rich Lister Sergei Sergienko: Driven by a fierce desire to make money. Dominic Lorrimer

His danger scenario starts with rising inflation, which pushes the yield on 10-year US Treasuries from 1.5 per cent to 6.5 per cent. The value of future income falls, pulling share prices down. Higher interest rates push up borrowing costs, causing home buyers to pull back on the size of mortgages, which in turn drives down property prices.
From October 2020 to November last year, Carnegie and his lawyers tried to convince authorities to let him list a cryptocurrency fund on the Australian Securities Exchange. The laws weren’t suitable. The tax system wasn’t ready. Scammers and “pond scum” needed to be chased out.
He watched Singapore, Dubai and Switzerland do what advanced-but-insular Australia would not. The political process couldn’t keep up with his ambition. “Until sensible regulation comes, the level of bad behaviour in this sector will be out of control as the most vulnerable are currently the least protected,” he says.
NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, who spent much of last year developing a crypto policy blueprint, was sympathetic. “I thought what he was seeking to do was reasonable in a developed financial system and economy like Australia,” Bragg says. “As you know, we can be sluggish to move on laws and policies that would improve our competitiveness.”
Unable to bend the institutions of state to his will, Carnegie agreed in December to sell half of MHC Digital Finance to a small Singapore investment fund, Intraco, for shares and cash worth as much as $50 million. The payment will be split with Sergienko, whose eventful life mirrors, in some ways, the wildness of the crypto industry.
After his family fled a mafia-controlled Russian steel town in 1996, the Sergienkos settled in Western Sydney as almost-refugees. A man with a bad haircut, thick accent and no financial training, Sergienko was driven by a fierce desire to make money. He ran brothels, took part in a Russian reality TV show called Secret Millionaire and lost millions in a Russian Ponzi scheme. Last year, he debuted on the Financial Review’s Young Rich List at No. 60 with an estimated wealth of $97 million.

Munger is a hero to Carnegie

Completion of the sale to the Singaporeans will depend on Carnegie and Sergienko’s success in investments so unconventional that some sophisticated investors reckon they’re a blight on humanity, including Warren Buffett’s business partner, Charlie Munger.
In May, Munger described bitcoin as disgusting and “contrary to the interests of civilisation”. “I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth,” said Munger. “Nor do I like just shuffling out of your extra billions and billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air.”
Munger is a hero to Carnegie. And he doesn’t entirely disagree with the veteran investor. Bitcoin, he says, is a distraction and “I wish it died tonight”. But the story is bigger. “Munger’s comments about bitcoin and those dedicated to trading ‘shitcoins’ are fair and accurate but massively incomplete about what is happening in the Web 3.0 ecosystem,” he says.


Charlie Munger has described bitcoin as disgusting. Getty

To explain his point, Carnegie moves the conversation to Barotseland, a region straddling Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola. Carnegie got to know the area through buffalo hunting in Zambia, a sport he is reluctant to discuss despite a belief it helps indigenous communities and is more ethical than industrial animal farms.
“Most of the foreigners who hunt in Africa are genuine f---wits,” he says. “It’s so fraught, and the people you are defending are such pigs.”
In western Zambia, Carnegie was introduced by a friend to the ugly economics of African families. In a patriarchal society, boys are valued for their labour, girls for dowries.
“You have these bright and talented young women who are stuck in situations where their value to their fathers is really the bride price, which is three to five cows,” he says. “The mum would want the kid to stay in school. The father’s got status and capital from selling the kid at 12 years old.”

For $1000, girls’ marriages could be delayed four years, or maybe even eight. The extra education would have a huge impact on their lives. Finding the capital isn’t hard. Africa is awash with public and private donations. The problem is a matter of trust. Donors have no way of enforcing a do-not-marry-off-your-daughter contract.
Developing world courts aren’t reliable. The blockchain, says Carnegie, can allow a charity in London to strike a deal with a west Zambian farmer that pays him bitcoin on his daughter’s birthdays if she’s not married. Enforcement of agreements – one of the greatest problems in economic development – can be automated. “The promise of crypto is you create trust in a trustless situation,” Carnegie says.
The blockchain can work at the national level, too. In Argentina, Myanmar, Nigeria, Venezuela and other countries where citizens don’t trust their government, cryptocurrencies are a protection against capricious capital controls. Carnegie has found that nations with the biggest gap between official and black-market exchange rates are the most enthusiastic cryptocurrency buyers.
And that is perhaps the ultimate reason for his enthusiasm: crypto doesn’t just fulfil a basic human need in parts of the planet that are still developing, it can help people protect their fundamental human rights.
‘I couldn’t breathe’

Carnegie embraces danger, physical and financial. He’s kayaked from Scotland to Ireland, gone deep-sea fishing in northern Queensland, and ridden Sumatra’s Kampar River tidal bore. This month, he went on an archeological expedition to Chad and Sudan, countries engaged in perennial civil wars.
Last summer, he was rafting with his oldest daughter, Bella, and two guides on the Zambezi River beneath Victoria Falls. At points where the river was narrow and shallow, rapids bounced the small boat around.
At a treacherous section, they flipped. Usually, capsizing is not a big deal. They were wearing helmets and life jackets, and should have floated to calm water.
Carnegie was caught underwater. His face was pressed against one of the raft’s cushioned seats. “I couldn’t breathe,” he says. “I thought I was going to die.” A guide pulled him out after what Carnegie estimated was five to 15 seconds. He was badly flustered. Apart from the near-drowning, something else was wrong. His body had been pumping so much adrenaline that his heart was beating too fast, a problem known as tachycardia.
“I had no idea what was going on,” he says. “We had to walk out of the valley. I am not feeling great, but I’m not really bad either.”

Carnegie didn’t see a doctor. He was on an African holiday. Six weeks later, during a drinking session in London, he was hit again. His heart began racing. It felt like he was breathing through gauze. He didn’t know if he was dying.
“It was one or two minutes of what-the-f---,” he says.
“I went to see a doctor. He took my pulse and said: ‘You are going straight to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.’”
He was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, a heart irregularity that reduces the organ’s ability to work. Without treatment, blood clots can form in the heart, travel to the brain and trigger strokes. For a man who revels in physical and verbal action, being unable to speak or walk properly would be a cruel ending.
Carnegie submitted to a 2½-hour operation at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital by cardiologist and professor Mark McGuire to toughen his heart. Recovering at an apartment overlooking Bondi Beach, he contemplated the defining question of existence.
“I thought: ‘Oh f---, what am I doing with my life?’”

The answer is crypto. If the government legalises exchange trading by the end of this financial year, Carnegie promises to hold a party for the entire industry at Bondi Icebergs.
The deadline will not be met. Carnegie will probably hold the party anyway, if Australia welcomes his business home. He can’t help himself. Death lasts too long.

• Mark Carnegie will be a guest speaker at the Financial Review’s inaugural Cryptocurrency Summit in Sydney on April 6.