In truth, people will only start to have real faith in Korean corporate responsibility when convicted bosses do their full jail terms and then stay out of corporate life. Shareholders could even be allowed to decide on the most suitable successor – and pick one from another family.
via The Korea discount: blame the businessmen | beyondbrics | FT.com.
And if your business model is based on managing domestic mutual funds and getting a steady flow of new investments, you’re not going to find life easy going forwards.
via Equities: The shift from active to passive | Analysis & Opinion |.
StealthModeWatch.com provides an API for finding and aggregating the Form D data programmatically, using filters and search syntax not available at the SEC’s web site.
This current beta release provides free (but limited) access to the Form D filing data.
We built it originally for our own venture research, but are happy to share it with other entrepreneurs, financiers, journalists, and other researchers.
Infinium used an algorithm to execute a “lead/lag” strategy to exploit any miniscule arbitrage opportunities between United States Oil Fund, a well known exchange traded fund that tracks the price of oil, and West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark US crude oil future.
On February 3 of this year with less than four minutes to go before Nymex closed floor trading for the day, Infinium turned on its new computer programme, which immediately started buying oil futures uncontrollably.
The algorithm managed to place 4,612 buy orders before it was was shut down five seconds later. The company then sent large offsetting sell orders but was left nursing a loss of $1.03m.
Infinium’s burst of buying and selling represented about 4 per cent the trading volume of the contract that day and caused a brief 1.3 per cent jump in the oil price.
James says the times when investors accepted fund terms without questioning are over. He recalls how, about a year ago, after the peak of the financial crisis, he and his partners sat down at the company’s New York headquarters and agreed that each of them would start calling investors regularly to check in. “We as an industry were lazy,” James says. “We were unresponsive to our investors. That world is gone.”
via Private Equity Finds the Easy Money Gone – BusinessWeek.
Fund-raising “was like a lottery in which every ticket was a winner. That was too good to be true”
via Private Equity Finds the Easy Money Gone – BusinessWeek.
Here’s a chart that to me sums up the past decade. This was supposed to be the Information Revolution…but what we mostly did was build homes.
To retain investors, hedge funds have had to shed their cloak of secrecy. Some managers have started to meet their investors regularly and provide them with more frequent reports about performance. Other firms give investors greater access, via their websites, to up-to-date information about returns, leverage and liquidity. “We are so much more transparent than we used to be, and more transparent to our investors than a lot of public institutions”, says Simon Lorne of Millennium Partners.
As of late July, the price of a Big Mac in Japan, at Y320 ($3.78 under Wednesday’s exchange rate), represented an exchange rate of Y85.7 in implied purchasing power parity of the dollar. The actual yen/dollar exchange rate then was Y87.2 – meaning the Japanese Big Mac was 2 per cent under-valued against the dollar, according to the index.
But here’s a beautiful twist: earlier in August, McDonalds cut the price of a Big Mac in Japan to just Y200 as part of a summer campaign. At what amounts to a 30 per cent discount, that would bring PPP down to Y52 to the dollar.
