Reggie Middleton

Reggie Middleton is an American entrepreneur who is the founder of Veritaseum^[1] and the finance and technology blog, Boom Bust Blog.^[2]

Until 2011, he wrote about financial evaluation and the global financial crisis at the Huffington Post.^[3] According to Forbes, Middleton "combines self-promotion with meticulous financial analysis that is often delivered with a whiff of bathroom humor".^[4]

Biography

Middleton is an alumnus of the Howard University with a bachelor's degree in business management.^[5]^[6]

He now resides in New York City with his two sons and daughter.

Career

After graduation from university, Middleton worked for Prudential Insurance and trained in the sale of financial products. Since then, he worked in the fields of financial securities and risk management. He was also a significant investor in residential real estate.

Middleton is known for making predictions about the crash of markets and large financial institutions long before they occur. Aaron Elstein of Crain's New York Business said "Mr. Middleton has been startlingly accurate in the past. He forecast the collapse of the housing market in 2007, and in early 2008 warned of the demise of Bear Stearns weeks before it happened. Earlier this year, he said that Ireland's finances were in terrible shape long before Standard & Poor's got around to downgrading that nation's credit rating."^[7]

In 2007, he founded Boom Bust Blog, a commercial financial advisory reported to have over 3000 subscribers.^[8]

In February 2013, he won CNBC's first-ever stock draft competition, beating out six other professional traders. He then went on to win the second CNBC stock draft in 2014 by an even larger margin, beating out all other professional participants.

In 2014, he founded Veritaseum, the progenitor of UltraCoin technology. According to Mr. Middleton,^[9] UltraCoin exploits modern cryptography in the fields of finance, economics and value transfer to disintermediate legacy financial institutions such as Wall Street banks.

Notable Calls, Investments and Analyses

2007

A physical illustration of Reggie Middleton's Veritaseum UltraCoin technology

In 2007, Reggie Middleton predicted the collapse of the US housing market,^[10] specifically warning of potential failure in exposed banks such as Bear Stearns, Countrywide and Washington Mutual as well as prominent publicly traded home building companies including DHI, Horton and Lennar.^[11] In addition, he delved into the homebuilding industry with a rare specificity in "Lennar, Voodoo Accounting & Other Things of Mystery and Myth!",^[12] where he brought to the attention of the public potentially abusive use of off balance vehicles. He called for collapse of the US commercial real estate market in November 2007 ^[13] and GGP (General Growth Properties, then the second largest commercial mall REIT in the country) in particular,^[14] who sported an investment grade rating and $60 per share equity price at the time of Reggie's prediction only to file for bankruptcy less than a year later. Reggie Middleton also actively opined on the collapse of US monoline insurers, whose share prices dropped to single digits from triple digits after Middleton's prognostications ^[15]^[16]

2008

Reggie Middleton is well known for being one of the very few to call the collapse of Bear Stearns in January 2008 ^[17] and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.^[18] Widely known as a contrarian investor, he has gone against mainstream sentiment quite often, most notably in his call to short Goldman Sachs ^[19] and Apple in 2011.^[20] He went bearish on the entire US regional banking sector in 2008, naming 32 banks which he felt were at risk ^[21]

2010

One of his most controversial calls was the impending financial collapse of a large portion of the European Union, which at the time of the initial call was highly contrarian and considered overly bearish.^[22] Middleton gave a presentation of his thoughts and analysis as the keynote speaker at ING's Valuation Conference in Amsterdam,^[23] Although known primarily for his work in financial, real estate and banking matters, Middleton forecast the impending "mobile computing wars" in which he claimed Apple, Google and Microsoft will battle for supremacy in the cellular handset and tablet market.^[24] He accurately called the fall of Research in Motion (RIMM), the maker of the Blackberry, now known simply as Blackberry, while it was trading over $40 per share.^[25]

2013

Middleton exposed cases of material omissions and misrepresentations in regard to EU bank's financial reporting, particularly as relates to debt, borrowings and encumbrances ^[26] and won the first annual CNBC Stock Draft with his recommendation of Google.^[27]

2014

Became the founder and CEO of Veritaseum, and the inventor of UltraCoin.^[28] VeritaseumTM was formed to allow individuals and business entities to conduct financial transactions directly (peer-to-peer) without knowing or trusting each other and without the involvement of a broker or a bank. Reggie Middleton wins the 2nd Annual CNBC for the second contiguous time, with the same pick of Google, up 45% for the period.^[29]

References

External links

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