When I was in wealth management, the key issue was permanent residency and not citizenship. The only HNWI clients that wanted citizenship and could buy it, were clients who did not pass the KYC/AML smell test. Those that were on the up and up and could afford it, did not want a Bahamian passport because of the visa requirements, Schengen and otherwise required of the holders. There are friendlier passports with less onerous visa requirements.

No, what I am saying is that those talented individuals do not have the assets and resources to back them up. Big firms employ data scientists to make sense of the data the you mention ... methods, surveys, focus groups, random sampling etc...

For example (and this was explained to me by my client) -- they need to do things like Map-Reduce and K-Means clustering of Big Data, using HDFS file systems and powerful Hadoop servers. It's just not enough to know that clients from snowy Toronto or Minnesota want to escape the winter in the warm sunny climes. You have to target the demographics with analytics and models derived from the very detailed analysis. You need to know how to identify them, know where they live, how to reach them with what media, and how much of your media spend goes to them in the overall demographic of your visitors. That is part of the extensive costs.

I was not talking specifically about Media Buy the tool, but rather media buy, the discipline and the analytics that has to go into this. Name me one firm in the Bahamas who regularly buys internet click data on a monthly basis, puts in into a data warehouse, does analytics and business intelligence cube operations on it and then sells the analytics to Fortune 500 companies. No one.

And that is why they are not qualified to do the work. Any reasonable human being, including Bahamians can have the knowledge and skills, but if they do not have the infrastructure behind them, then they can't do the job. It is like asking a cabinet maker to make fine furniture with rough carpenter tools.

We need all of the expert help that we can get to lure visitors to our shores. We can't give this job to someone who is not as prepared or equipped as the big boyz in the field. It is a matter of survival and it is that simple.

Hmmm .. obviously Forbes hasn't read the Canadian Government's warning about buying real estate in The Bahamas.

I am having trouble getting over that as well. Don't people manage their lives? Where is the husband? Where is the child support money? How do you bring a child into this world without insuring that you have the finances to do so? Wow.

As a former investment analyst and adviser, I did not recommend any BISX listed stocks to my clients. The market is moribund, and the regulators are either non-existent or egregiously failing at their mandates and jobs. BoB was and probably still is in non-compliance with capital requirements and has been allowed to be in that state for over a year. It is a de facto bankrupt entity that should be wound up. Other listed entities like Alliance and Benchmark who are being prosecuted or were prosecuted, were essentially insolvent and they were still listed with no action taken by the exchange. We have the shenanigans like Gibraltar and Warren Davis in that milieu.

The management of BISX is laughable. They announced that they went through a several month exercise for crowdfunding. It is laughable, because crowdfunding bypasses exchanges. The SMART funds that were supposed to re-invigorate BISX and create investment vehicles are non-starters.

BISX is a waste of time and money. The only way to make it a viable market, is to revamp it completely such that stocks are bought and sold in American dollars, opening the markets to foreign capital, AND to have impeccable, bullet-proof regulation (perhaps external foreign auditors with the power of the law behind them and the motivation to act) to protect investors. This will never happen, so BISX should be shut down.

In the rolodex of my previous life, a client of mine did a Capabilities Survey of the PR firms in the Bahamas. The usual suspects showed up, such as Diane Phillips, The Councillors, Digital Isle etc etc and none of them had the contacts, the platform, the analytics capability of doing a major, mult-million dollar media buy. Specifically they were looking at launching a medical devices campaign, and were looking to do Programmatic Media Buying with Data & Decisioning Solutions.

What these things are, is a meta-data analysis platform run on a powerful server containing rules engines and a plethora of marketing statistics to analyse and determine the where, what, why and how of advertising.

The technology of advertising has rapidly progressed, and with the decline of the third estate (newspapers etc), one uses decision support software to get the biggest bang for the buck. These decision support tools costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software, and after that, an expensive subscription to data collection companies that garner data from internet click-thrus, advertising experiments by mail in various markets, etc.

It is not a matter of know-how -- there are categorically no Bahamian firms with the infrastructure or manpower to do the job of worldwide marketing.

It is naive to think otherwise. Like most folks here, many do not know what they don't know. Media buying is now a science and skill done by statisticians and data scientists who feed the savvy marketers who have contacts in the industry.

>Are Bahamian's not capable of marketing The Bahamas

The short answer is "no". Not for the reason that you think. The field is called "Media Buy" and it involves market analytics, research, and digital eCommerce. There are no media houses in the Bahamas that fit the bill.

It is not enough to buy media in traditional places (remember the New York subway media buy that was a major fiasco and waste of millions under the older PLP regime?). You need to know what allocation that you will do for online advertising, and in what geographic areas and what demographics to target. There are software platforms now (similar to the ones used by salesforce.com) that do continuous analysis and allocation. You have to have the data to efficiently calculate what part of your media buy budget goes to what medium -- whether online or print or whatever. If it is print and television, then you have to identify your demographic and create ads to target that demographic. Obviously you want someone with experience to do this, and sadly, because of the small, insular population of The Bahamas, we do not have that expertise.

I liked their old acronym better. It used to make me chuckle when I read it. This was when they were known as NCTU before they added the 'B'.

If unions want to exist in the Bahamas, they should publish their accounts every six months including salaries, bank accounts, and cash flows. Otherwise, they should lose their certifications.

I used to wash all of the fruit in a javax/water solution. I admit that the flies were horrible -- and not helped by the bits of rotting fruit on the ground. Also the 5 gallon garbage pail of bad fruit had an interesting selection of insects that I had never seen before.

However it was the only place that I could get custard apples, soursops, guineps, breadfruit and dillies on a regular basis when they were in season. And the mangoes were the size of a small child's head. It was even better in terms of selection when she bought produce from the multitude of Haitian sloops that used to anchor in the harbour off Arawak Cay. I used to bring a mixed bag of her stuff to my Auntie in Montell Heights and she thought it was like Christmas with a cornucopia of good stuff.

I used to buy a lot of stuff from her.