ETF criticisms don’t stand up to scrutiny September 21, 2011 EVEN prior to Kweku Adoboli’s UBS fraud, there was plenty of mud being slung at exchange-traded funds (ETF) – almost all unjustifiable. UBS’s rogue trader is irrelevant to the concerns of retail investors, for whom ETFs offer a cheap and liquid way to track many indexes. UBS IN CONTEXT In the case of the UBS [...]
Only facing up to your debt problems will stop the stress September 21, 2011 DON’T look so frightened,” Tracy Finn tells me. We are sat in the big Queen Street branch of HSBC in the City. It’s 10am on Wednesday morning, and I’m only about a year late for this meeting. “I help dozens of people with their personal debt every month,” she assures me. “Most of them earning [...]
Growing role of automatic FX trading September 21, 2011 OVER the last two years, we have witnessed a significant increase in demand to trade automatically in the FX market. Even if it is to follow the same trend as the equity and futures markets after Mifid – its high levels of liquidity and huge volumes of trade per day makes it a very attractive [...]
FTSE makes gains on lower volumes September 20, 2011 THE FTSE 100 index rose two per cent yesterday as traders said dividend hunters tapped into beaten-down defensives and there was some short-covering ahead of a Federal Reserve meeting on US monetary policy options. Oil stocks including BP, pharmaceuticals including GlaxoSmithKline and telecoms including Vodafone were among those adding most points to the index. But [...]
Wall St awaits Fed decision as Greece stalls September 20, 2011 US stocks ended little changed yesterday as investors waited to see if the US Federal Reserve would offer more economic stimulus and if Greece made progress in talks to avoid a default. In the lowest volume session since late August, the market gave up earlier gains of about one per cent as investors were wary [...]
Replicate innovators’ disruptive DNA September 20, 2011 “SO what makes innovators different from the rest of us? Most of us believe this question has been answered. It’s a genetic endowment. Some people are right brained, which allows them to be more intuitive and divergent thinkers. Either you have it or you don’t. But does research really support this idea? Our research confirms [...]
A model for the generation of innovation September 20, 2011 “THE DNA of innovators – or the code for generating innovative ideas – is expressed in the model on the right. The key skill for generating innovative ideas is the cognitive skill of associational thinking. BEHAVIOURAL SKILLS The reason that some people generate more associations than others is partly because their brains are just wired [...]
Downgrade of Italy adds to Eurozone woes September 20, 2011 THE downgrade of Italy’s sovereign debt rating by Standard and Poor’s (S&P) ratings agency was another sounding of the death knell for the Eurozone in its current incarnation. When it announced the revision yesterday from A+ to A, S&P noted Italy’s “weakening economic prospects” and the difficulty of the “fragile governing coalition” being able to [...]
MARKET TOO COMPLACENT ON THE EURO September 20, 2011 YESTERDAY, while London was sleeping and Tokyo traders were just starting their day, Standard and Poor’s downgraded Italy, sending euro-dollar into free fall, as the unit plunged more than 100 points in a matter of minutes. Yet when London traders arrived at their desks, the pair proceeded to stage a comeback recovering all of its [...]
THE TIPSTER September 20, 2011 THE dollar’s strength in recent weeks has seen it really surge against its neighbour the Mexican peso, having appreciated some 14 per cent since mid-July. A break above the peso13.000 level is quite significant for the dollar bulls, meaning a test of peso14.000 cannot be ruled out. Capital Spreads quotes peso13.1270-peso13.1470 for dollar-Mexican peso. We [...]