Arque Orion Winter Skies, Ltd. is a California corporation and holding company for the Arque Orion Group.  

The Arque Orion Group provides global financial services to high net worth private clients, institutional clients, and active traders in the United States and in Japan.  Today, the group consists of Arque Capital, Ltd., a U.S. securities broker-dealer, Arque & Co. Incorporated, a U.S. registered investment advisor, and Taicom Securities Co., Ltd., a Japanese securities, commodities and FX broker-dealer.  Arque Orion Winter Skies, Ltd., a U.S. holding company, also acts as managing member of a private equity investment vehicle called Arque Orion Japan Partners, LLC.

The Arque Orion Group manages and/or custodies over $450 Million of client assets on a delevered basis and over $850 Million of client assets on a levered basis worldwide.  Client assets are generally custodied through National Financial, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, in the United States and at Chuo Mitsui Trust Bank in Japan.  Members of the Arque Orion Group are members of FINRA, the Osaka Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Commodities Exchange, and the Tokyo Grain Exchange.  The Arque Orion Group consists of approximately 200 employees and associates located in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Odawara, and Toyama.

The leader of the Arque Orion Group is also affiliated with IA Global, Inc., a public venture capital company (NYSE Euronext:IAO), which invests in financial service and business processing businesses in Asia.

 

Our Vision

The Arque Orion Group believes that smart investors can profit handsomely where there is excessive volatility.  By nature, we tend to be value-oriented contrarians and prefer to invest into select sectors often abandoned by other investors.  As practitioners, we look for attractive circumstances where trading volatility may provide extraordinary opportunities to purchase at lower prices than usually warranted or to sell at higher prices than usually possible.  As such, we tend to purchase distressed or broken companies in unpopular industry sectors where purchase prices are deeply discounted and where we believe there could be reasonable exit opportunities after a reasonable period of time.  In short, we like what we perceive to be low-risk, high-return investment opportunities. 

Today, as a result of the beginning global economic slump, there are many distressed companies in many industry sectors around the world.  Especially damaged are companies in the financial services, building and construction, and automobile manufacturing sectors.  The Arque Orion Group believes that because of the breakdown in market values, there are tremendous numbers of undervalued financial service companies today more than ever.  The trick, of course, is to find real hidden value and to not purchase flawed balance sheets with virtual assets or hidden liabilities. 

Some experts state that the recession that we entered in December 2007 will be the worst recession since World War II.  We believe that this recession will actually end up being worse than the 1929 – 1932 depression.  We also believe that the extraordinary amount of printed money that is about to be used by the G7 and Chinese central banks to reflate the global economy will eventually result in global hyperinflation.  As we traverse through these conditions over the next three years, we believe that the current financial services infrastructure will continue to break down and that a major retooling and paradigm shift will change the sector for the better. 

We are preparing to take advantage of the many forced changes that we believe will appear as a result of the paradigm shift to purchase distressed financial service companies, to fix each firm then consolidate them into an operation that will adopt a new business model designed to succeed in the new financial service infrastructure, and to ultimately create real value.   

In November 2006, we started our first private equity fund and subsequently purchased our first Japanese investment brokerage company.  Today, after spending two years fixing this company and introducing a new business model, we have signed a letter of intent to sell the company for about the same amount of money that we originally invested.  While this may not sound immediately attractive, when one considers that most investment brokerage companies in Japan today are selling at reduced values that are lower by 35% – 70% from two years ago, we believe that our investment results are more than satisfactory.  We intend to use the proceeds from the sale to acquire another larger but distressed Japanese investment brokerage company, probably at a deep discount to its book value.

As always, we will inject a healthy amount of our own capital into our acquisitions and occasionally will invite select investors to invest with us.