I wound up having to spend less time at Bronx Science than expected—because two students whom I was supposed to help prep for their college acceptance interviews failed to turn up. These Chinese-Americans clearly lack respect for their elders, like me.

So here is a special blog with news in it rather than tables, to make up for the next Jewish holiday which hits today and Tuesday, the Feast of Booths to celebrate the harvest, Jewish traditional practices include waving palm branches. Christians do it in early spring, before Easter, but they didn't learn that from Succoth.

Funds

*Former Aberdeen Chile Fund, CH, is now Aberdeen Emerging Markets Income Fund, AEF, after a complex reorganization in April by the manager, Standard Life Aberdeen (SLFPY) whose shares we also own. This involved ex-CH AEF taking over the following Aberdeen Funds: Emerging Markets Smaller Co Opportunities (ABE); Israel (ISL); Indonesia (IF); Latin America Equity (LAQ); Singapore (SGF); Greater China (GCH); and Asia Tigers (GRR). LAQ was the successor for performance tallies.

Our CH was tendered for by the board in May-June which offered to buy 32% of the shares out at 99% of net asset value (NAV). In the end, the offer was oversubscribed and AEF shares were bought at $7.9002/sh, prorated. AEF also paid $0.882 in a special dividend on June 15. Our fund also borrowed $65 mn (US) from Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS, whose shares we also own) via a revolving credit facility whose terms we do not know.

We also had to pay $443,000 in Chilean reptariation taxes; $351,000 in leaal fees; $198,000 in administration fees; $176,00 in custody fees; $ 73,000 in insurance expenses; $66,000 in directors' fees and expenses; $60,000 for reports and proxies; $42,000 in IR fees; $34,000 to indepdent auditors; $27,000 in transfer agent fees; $4,600 to accountants; and $94,000 in miscelaneous. We also paid $19,396 in interst and lost $2,461,275 in foreign currency losses.

Now we have been sent the June 30 semi-annual report by our AEF which reveals that in the H1 our fund's NAV fell 6% and its market price fell 10.8%, fractionally beating the MSCI Emerging Markets index. It also gives us a hint as to why this exercise was carried out.

Our fund now has almost no listed Israeli shares or ADRs and the country doesn't appear in its allocations at all. This is NOT because of any boycott or divestiture of Israeli shares by the fund managers, but more of a cover-up. In the granular details, I found that the successor funds has stakes in 21 Israeli illiquid non-income producing private equity entities called ABS, BPA, Delta, Exent, Flash, Giza, Neurone, and most of all Vidyo whose fair value is 0.2% of funds under management. All were acquired between 1998 and 2015 (the Vidyo in 2013), six of which are in liquidation and another 12 worth pennies on the dollar. There were 21 in all at the start, which means this was a really poor management decision, why Aberdeen set out to hide this disaster by the complex merger.

Other fudges: our fund's largest holding is 6.7% of its assets in Tencent Holdings of China, TCEHY and zero assets in its much cheaper 31% owner, Naspers of South Africa, which is really an emerging markets play. It also owns a 3.8% chunk of Samsung of South Korea; 4.1% of Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. and 2.4% of Taiwan Mobile; and 3.1% in India's Infosys and Tata Consultancy--none emerging markets plays. In fact, it has 8.1% of its assets in Hong Kong; 6.8% in the US; 6.5% in Taiwan; 6.3% in South Korea; 1.2% in the UK, and 1.1% in Portugal. All are not in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

We use closed-end funds to get management of our money in countries where it is hard to invest, where families control much of the market, where regulators ban foreigners, where information is scant. Buying Tencent or Samsung or Taiwan Semi doesn't involve any of these skills.

*Last week Mexican Equity & Income Fund made an offer to buy back its shares at 99% of NAV. It may also convert to an open-end fund. This cut MXE's discount from NAV to 7.5% vs nearly double that for the larger Mexico Fund, MXF. We have preferred MXE for decades because it performed better than MXF, and because, until 2013, it was run by a woman, unusual in macho Mexico, Maria Eugenia Pichardo. She resigned as chair but remains portfolio manager because of a perceived conflict of interest as her Pichardo Asset Management SA de CV also manages money for private clients. So closed-end activist Phillip Goldstein of Bulldog Investors who likes to liquidate funds to make money took over as chair.

*Korea Fund may get a boost after Advisor Shares KIM announced that it will close its Korea Equity

Exchange Traded Funds, KOR, on Oct. 1. Owners will receive cash proceeds Oct. 8. There are 6 other Korea ETFs but closed-end funds are often a better way to lure investors into a single and quirky foreign market, as has been proven by the difficulty faced by ETFs there.

*Vanguard is playing down its Precious Metals & Mining offerings (its open-end fund, VGPMX is being reduced in size by 75% and its manager was let go.) This may be a contrarian signal to gold bugs.

Healthcare

*The big change this past week was that the main Dow-Jones Index caught up with the tech-heavy Nasdaq one.

Our particular gains came mostly from the healthcare sector. Bayer made a milestone payment to Israeli Compugen as another CGEN find moved into the clinic. The cleanup hinted at earlier by US$ 5 mn of insider buying at new pick Bausch Health Cos indeed produced a reduction of debt the Canada firm. Medtronic made a bid for Mazor Robotics shares it doesn't already own.

*Teva surprisingly did get FDA approval of its new quarterly injected migraine prevention drug now labeled Ajovoy, formerly fremanezumabon Sept. 16, a week ago, which helped boost its share price too. Now the Crédit Suisse analyst who covers the Israel drug firm, V. Divan, reports that patients and doctors are very excited about the anti-CGRP migraine drug class. The key specialization TEVA gained is because you only get a jab every 3 months, with a pre-filled syringe rather than an auto-injector. He also points out that during the trials there were high rates of injection site reactions with Ajovoy compared to smaller auto-injector. These worried hit TEVA Friday when it lost 1.9%, falling to $24.36.

Miscellaneous

*It is important to return to our main reason for having bought into the predecessor of Nutrien in the first place, the likely growth of demand for fertilizer which NTR expects will hit a recover this year at up to 67 mn metric tonnes and which have boosted spot prices. Higher energy prices hurt competing suppliers which don't have access to cheap nitrogen and cheap natural gas in western Canada. Don't ignore one of the features of the predecessor company we owned, Agrium, its retail arm, selling seeds, plants, and bulbs, fertilizer and tools, to gardeners as well as farmers. This business will see ~C$8 mn of new investment according to Nutrien, which wants to grow it. This will lead to M&A and greenfield builds in Canada, the US, and also in Australia and Brazil. According to analyst Steve Hanson of Raymond James brokers, in its Q2, NTR high-margin retail earnings (before interest, taxation, depreciation, and amortization) were up 17% y/y, and 11% gross. While WholeFoods sells potted plants and herbs, Amazon doesn't sell most of this stuff.

*Antofagasta gained 18.4% last week as copper prices rose (but not as quickly.) ANFGF listed in London more than a century ago when Chile didn't have a stock exchange, and its trading is quirky.

*Virgin Money fell after it went ex-div. VRGDF.

*Oops. Abhimanyu Sisodia pointed out that the budget Azure Power is planning to invest in the State of Odissa for renewable installations is not $2.8 mn but $2.8 bn. He explains that India is a promising solar market which accounted for about 30% of all corporate solar investments last year. I am responsible for having changed the number in his original filing.

*Having been designated as a Microsoft cloud migration expert manager, Infosys now also partnered with Google Cloud for migration and analytics services. We sold INFY because its digital technology for large corporate customers seemed to be passé, but I admit I may be wrong. But taking on both doesn't amount to winning IBM or the big kahuna, Amazon. It may mean conflict of interest problems.