Metals: Keeping market value in proper perspective

For just about anybody in the business world, the term “metals” immediately calls to mind the fast-paced trading action of places like the London Metals Exchange, where fortunes rise and fall each day based on the flux in demand for aluminum, zinc, nickel, tin and a host of other metals. As a former metals analyst, I can attest to the fact that a veritable army […]

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Fracking and Shale; M&E Appraisers Need to Understand that Not All Drill Sites are Created Equal

For the past several years, high-volume hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) has helped the U.S. energy sector extract more and more petroleum and natural gas from shale and other deposits deep beneath the surface of the earth. The development of this technology in itself would be a boon to borrowers in oil and gas. But it happens to also coincide with a string of truly massive […]

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Squeezing Dollars: How to Create Added Value in Auction Scenarios

Judging liquidation firms based on their experience with particular asset types has a certain logical consistency. For instance, if your goal is to qualify yourself to a major meatpacking company, the thinking goes, you should seek a firm with years of experience in liquidating meatpacking assets. Upon closer examination, however, this logic breaks down. Today’s marketplace demands not merely depth of experience in certain sectors, […]

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Blowing in the wind: Are plastic-bag bans the death knell for related M&E?

The global backlash against plastic bags — visible in the form of taxes and outright bans on grocery and merchandising bags made of blown-film plastic—threatens to undermine the recovery value of dedicated M&E in this sector. And it is worth noting that the production line equipment used to make these increasingly demonized products typically is no small investment: The latest versions of so-called bubble or […]

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Pharma vs. Nutraceutical: Different Sectors, Different Needs

Experienced appraisers know to never value a piece of equipment as though it were in a vacuum, because understanding equipment use is at least as important as its specs when projecting realistic market recovery. The differing applications of like equipment as is used within the pharmaceutical or nutraceutical (nutritional and herbal supplements) sectors are a case in point.

Previously, Tiger liquidated the assets of Creation’s Garden, […]

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