Young people make better entrepreneurs because they're too inexperienced to know that their ideas are silly: The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind...
How To Beat The Stock Market: Buy Companies With High Customer Satisfaction Scores
A study in the Journal of Marketing concludes that you can beat the market consistently by buying stock in companies with high customer satisfaction ratings: Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the authors of a study published in...
Rising Exports Putting Dent in Trade Gap
Over half of the 9.1 million vehicles General Motors produced last year were sold in foreign countries... With the slumping housing market taking a toll on its business at home, Caterpillar is counting on sales of equipment and diesel engines in...
US Fed Survey: Subprime Lenders Tightening Standards; Prime Lending Business As Usual
In its periodic Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices released Monday, the Fed found that while bankers have become more stringent when dealing with subprime and nontraditional mortgages, policy toward standard loans remains...
SEC steps up action on insider trading
International stock exchanges and electronic trading are changing the way US regulators detect and punish insider trading, forcing them to speed up their investigations and take court action more quickly. During the past year and a half, the US...
Wharton: Are Hedge Funds out of Control?
If you go to Amazon.com and search for books about venture capital, you get 14,114 responses, which include many text books. Andrew Metrick, a professor of finance at Wharton, has just written a new book on the subject titled, "Venture Capital and...
Steve Forbes says the American economy is stable, but anxiety remains.
There may be yet another villain at work: inflation. Many of us are familiar with John Maynard Keynes' quote, "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the...
Courtroom intelligence: Hedge fund investment strategies
Hedge fund managers are always looking for an edge. Lately they've found one by sending patent litigators to court -- not to try a case, but as highly informed (and highly paid) observers. Their task: to pick up and quickly report back to the money...
Big rise in suspicious trades
US stock and options exchanges are spotting more suspicious trading connected to high-profile deals, such as News Corps bid for Dow Jones, and are making more referrals to US regulators for investigation of possible insider trading. Between January...
Regulators probe trading in Dow Jones before Murdoch's bid
US authorities have reportedly launched investigations into suspicious trading in Dow Jones Co. before a bid for the company by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.Dow Jones received a subpoena from the New York state attorney general's office and an inquiry...
Hedge funds pose a risk, but less alarming, says Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said on Wednesday that the risk hedge funds pose to the global financial system has reached levels by some measures comparable to those just before the Long Term Capital Management fund imploded in 1998. But the...
Dow Stocks: Best winning streak since '55...
The Dow Jones industrial average hit another record high Wednesday, capping its longest winning stretch in almost 52 years as investors welcomed strong earnings, lower oil prices, media merger news and a strong reading on manufacturing.The Dow (up...
Citigroup to buy Bisys Group, for $1.45bn
Citigroup and hedge funds. The US uber-bank can't decide whether it wants to get into bed with the industry - or hide under it, for fear that it starts asking awkward questions about how the component parts of the world's biggest financial services...
Where the Next Big Bets Lie for Venture Capitalists
The venture capital sector is finally bouncing back from its post-bubble blues, although it's still a long way from the euphoria of the late 1990s. Blockbuster deals -- like YouTube's recent sale to Google for $1.65 billion and Skype's sale last...
Crestmont Research: The top hedge fund myths
The tone from Crestmont - which, according to its web blurb, says it “develops provocative insights on the financial markets and on the hedge fund industry” - is a tad tetchy. “Never has an industry so extensively studied by “experts” produced such...
Top 3 fund managers earn over $1bn
The combined earnings of the world's top 25 hedge fund managers of almost $15bn exceeded the national income of Jordan last year and three individuals took home more than $1bn, according to an industry survey....
China expects trade surplus of $168 billion for 2006
The Chinese trade surplus will swell by 65 percent to a record $168 billion this year, the Chinese customs bureau said Thursday, less than a week before the U.S. Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, travels to Beijing to discuss ways to reduce the...
Deloitte Touche: Holiday Spending Predictions
A quick glance at the windows of our nation’s retailers reveals that, once again, holiday season is upon us. While the holiday shopping frenzy is recurring and predictable, the nuances of consumer behavior during this time of year can have enormous...
Drowning in zeros computing the OTC
Nowhere is it easier to be blase about big numbers than in the market for over-the-counter derivatives. Yet the numbers released by the Bank for International Settlements this morning, charting OTC derivative activity during the first half of this...
Insider: A hedge fund revolution? A prominent hedge fund manager is causing ripples within the industry for using a pay structure based on the idea of delayed gratification.
Among the certain unalienable rights of finance in 2006 is that of successful hedge fund managers to make a lot of money.That right is embedded in the compensation structure of the funds: Most managers receive 2 percent of the assets they manage as...
Investing: How to recognize a bubble - before it bursts
Asset bubbles, like artistic geniuses, have a reputation for going unrecognized in their lifetimes. That does not deter Ajay Kapur, Citigroup's chief global equity strategist, from trying to identify markets around the world that may be experiencing...
Study: The controversial practice of backdating stock options went hand-in-hand with poor corporate governance practices and overbearing chief executives.
The research by three academics is the first to suggest a link between lax internal controls and stock options backdating. The scandal has so far engulfed more than 130 US companies in internal and regulatory probes but the study suggests that...
Straight forward VC advice from Sequoia
In the crowded field of US venture capital, where arguably too much money is chasing the available quality investments and some firms bemoaning the industry's prospects , Sequoia Capital is on something of a run. Having reaped a reported $495m - or...
Algorithmic trading to take majority share in 2010
More than half of all equities trading in the US will be done using algorithmic dealing systems by the end of 2010, according to Boston-based research consultancy Aite Group. Aite says algorithmic trading has hit the mainstream in the US equities...
Judge postpones criminal trial of 16 former KPMG executives accused of selling illegal tax shelters.
One of the Department of Justice’s most high-profile white-collar crime cases has been dealt a blow after a New York federal judge postponed indefinitely the criminal trial of 16 former KPMG executives accused of selling illegal tax shelters.The...
US economy on track for soft landing as consumer spending remained resilient
A slew of economic reports on Tuesday showed the US economy feeling the strain from the sharp slowdown in the housing sector, while offering very tentative hopes that inflation pressures could be easing.The news came as Japan announced a...
Equities Swing With Harvard MBAs
Mr. Soifer tracks how many Harvard Business School graduates choose market-sensitive jobs each year. If 10% or less of that year's class take jobs in investment banking, investment management, sales trading, venture capital, private equity, or...
US trade gap narrows
The US trade deficit narrowed in September in a sign that economic growth may have been stronger than previously thought in the third quarter. The Commerce Department said the trade gap shrank to $64.3bn after hitting a record high of $69bn in...
UBS Rolls Out Buy-Side Research
The New York arm of Swiss financial services firm UBS is introducing a curious animal into stock research: internally generated buy-side research that competes with the firm's own sell-side research. The brokerage firm is assembling a group of 10 to...
Bank of America/MBNA first the merger, now the song
Here's a clip of two Bank of America executives -- one on the guitar, the other doing his best Bono impression at the microphone -- celebrating the coming together of two great institutions into one great bank. It's quite shocking, particularly...
SEC chief gets blogging
Chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox, has joined the blogging world. In a comment on Sun Microsystem's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz's blog, the SEC chief showed interest in Mr Schwartz's recent request that blogs be used as a way to expand...
Trade Blog, a investing and trading information blog. Providing a daily dose of news and features from the world of the personal finance, business forecasting, and financial industry for both the consumer and brokerage professional....
87 percent of parents believe scholarships and grants will cover at least part of their children's undergraduate expenses
The study looked at the college saving habits and goals of parents with children under 18 and compared them with what college financial aid administrators have to say about college funding. Financial aid administrators said 92 percent of parents...
Starbucks Raises Prices on Coffee Drinks
Got three bucks? That and a nickel will buy you a coffee drink at Starbucks . Starbucks Corp. said Thursday that it planned to raise prices of its lattes, cappuccinos, drip coffee and other drinks by 5 cents, or an average of 1.9 percent....
Southern California Real Estate Sales
Home sales in Southern California continued at their slowest pace in nine years as price levels appeared to be nearing a plateau. A total of 25,628 new and resale homes sold in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino and Orange...
Why does it take so long for a trader to learn?
Like I've said before, I've seen as much so-called wisdom over the years that I've eventually learned to hold as inviolate truth, as that which should be thrown out with yesterday's garbage. Yet why does the eventual accumulation of pertinent...
Tourism Satellite Accounts Q2 - 2006
Growth in real tourism output slowed to an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the second quarter of 2006, according to data released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter of 2006, real tourism output grew 5.0 percent...
UK Online Insurance Sales Forecast: 2006 To 2011
Online non-life insurance has grown spectacularly in the UK over the past five years, driven by fierce competition between insurance companies and customers' tendency to shop around every two or three years, particularly for motor insurance. We...
When Words Get in the Way: The Failure of Fiscal Language
Does the federal deficit matter? Oceans of ink track and report this monster tally (current estimates for fiscal year 2006 stand at $260 billion), yet Jerry Green of Harvard Business School and Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University contend that...
Full-Service Brokerages: Stop Neglecting The Net
Full-service firms like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley are betting that their high-net-worth clients don't mind anemic Web sites. But it's a bad bet: Affluent investors are more active online than ever before, and they recognize the quality gap...
