Tag Archives: Financial Services

Copper – Primer & Outlook

Copper is regarded as the most valuable of primary base metals, barring nickel, even though it is not the largest base metal market in the world. Indeed, it is considered a barometer for the state of the economy, given its … Read More…

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Is There Any Value in Forecasts?

With most companies either in or rapidly approaching their business planning cycles, executives and analysts alike are hard at work trying to predict how the next fiscal year will unfold, making a range of decisions from where best to focus … Read More…

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Asset Bubbles and Bursts: The Re-emergence of Rational Valuation

Aswath Damodaran, the famed NYU finance professor and High Priest of quantitative valuation, shares a lot with Edward Altman, his equally famous colleague at NYU. (Damodaran penned “Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset”, a … Read More…

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“Is it Safe?” The Outlook for Investment in Emerging Markets

There’s a classic scene in the 1976 hit movie, The Marathon Man, in which Laurence Olivier, playing a skilled dentist who is also a Nazi war criminal, is torturing a young Dustin Hoffman. Using his medical know-how and some frightening … Read More…

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Awaiting The Green Revolution…

At a recent address to the NYU Money Marketeers, a New York-based association of financial market participants, Kenneth Volpert, head of the Fixed Income Group at Vanguard, reviewed just how far and how fast the credit markets had improved since … Read More…

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The (Ir)rationality of Markets

The Financial Times recently reported on a recent survey by the British Chartered Financial Analyst Institute of its members, which found that an increasing proportion believed that markets did not behave rationally: The British CFA recently asked members for the … Read More…

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Rethinking the Corporate Ladder

Periods of economic upheaval tend to see organizations rethinking their relationship with their employees. Some of this is driven by the employer (see the ‘rightsizing’ that has taken place over the last year), but others are driven by the changing … Read More…

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