Roxanne Downer – My Articles

Romancing the Stone: For decades, Martin Rapaport has tried to create diamond futures, running afoul of the industry. A study in tenacity.

“We’re at the very beginning of the birth process,” says Martin Rapaport of his crusade to launch a futures contract for diamonds. His tone is strikingly upbeat for someone whose life’s work has been marred by so much failure. “Something has to happen.”
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Look-Alike Option: Ballsy Ivy Leaguers are back yet again in the latest from Ben Mezrich

A TWENTYSOMETHING Harvard Business School graduate visits a foreign country, romps with models, conducts some shady back-alley business and single-handedly revolutionizes the financial markets. Sound familiar? No, it’s not Ugly Americans Part Deux: The Smell of Fear — it’s Rigged, the latest from Ben Mezrich’s seemingly bottomless well of “nonfiction” novels chronicling the lives of young hot-shot Ivy League financial pirates out to take over the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Capital Investments: Survey says, these are the year’s strongest buys.

The beauty of investing your bonus check in luxury real estate is that — unlike with, say, a Bugatti Veyron — you can actually live in this impulse buy. (OK, technically you could live in the Bugatti, but just imagine the leg cramps!) And our survey reveals that the habitat traders most long to inhabit is Ian Schragers’s second-ever residential property. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tip Sheet: A New York City landmark, an island getaway and Magnum’s crib vie for your attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Booking Profits: Literary trader David Breskin is both a Shakespeare and a Soros

Fund manager and writer David Breskin takes an interest in models. Quant models. Pricing models. And, uh, runway models. But his fascination with the latter, he insists, is less prurient than sociological. “The day after the [December 2004] tsunami, the New York Daily News headline was New York Supermodel Found,” Breskin says. “Three hundred fifty thousand people died, but the model in the tree” — Czech beauty Petra Nemcova, ultimately rescued clinging to a palm tree in Phuket, Thailand — “became the hook of the story. That pointed out that models are necessary for us. We need these kinds of icons.
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The Tip Sheet: Meet the world’s coolest trike and your Mercedes on steroids; experience a Talladega night. Read the rest of this entry »

Flush with cash from another obscene bonus? With the hours ticking down on 2006, now is the right time to arm yourself with one of the year’s most popular timepieces.

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