The case is based on the fixed income investment team at Value Partners Group Limited (VP), a publicly-listed, Hong Kong-based fund and asset management company founded in 1993, focusing primarily on Greater China and Asian investments and following an investing approach referred to as value investing. Set in December 2014, the cumulative returns from September to November 2014 for the Value Partners Greater China High Yield Income Fund (The Fund)-the firm's flagship fixed income fund-were negative. The year had started out slowly, but momentum picked up in the summer until a number of external events affected returns, including: Occupy Central in Hong Kong; the market's concern about the end of the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing; Chairman Xi's anticorruption campaign in Beijing; and the Chinese property market suffering from excess inventory. Investors reacted to these events by pulling their money out of The Fund, and September returns for The Fund were down 2.2% for the month. The December bond market movement was drastic enough that Gordon Ip, Fixed Income Fund Manager for VP, and his team needed to react. Ip was under intense pressure to increase performance, since December was the last month of the year and investors would more closely scrutinize his performance. He needed to make a decision.

Greenlight Biosciences, a biotech company is in search of impact investment for its next round of financing.

The June 2017 news that e-commerce giant Amazon was paying $13.7 billion for organic supermarket chain Whole Foods precipitated a broad sell-off in the shares of grocery retailers and suppliers. Behind the precipitous declines lay recognition that Amazon's bold move into brick and mortar assets offered transformational opportunities. Amazon could gain expertise in perishable product sales and procurement, plus access to 30 million well-off shoppers and 463 grocery stores in key U.S. markets. Whole Foods could absorb Amazon's technology and process expertise to modernize and reduce its operating costs, which were among the highest in the industry. For grocery retailers and suppliers, the deal portended increased competitive pressures in a saturated market. As 2018 dawned, all parties were assessing the deal's implications. Had the stock market overreacted to news of the deal? Why was Amazon buying Whole Foods? What were the long-term implications of the deal for the food value chain?