Tag Archives: Investing

To Sell or Not to Sell, That Is the Question Most investors have to face loss aversion in their own investment portfolios when they incur losses. For long term investments the best course of action is to stay invested through the ups and downs of markets. But what if an investment is short term or has a limited investment horizon and the remaining time is shorter than the time needed to recover? Imagine that an investor has bought a specific stock with the intention of holding it...

Pokémon Go Gave It a Go This summer we saw the first widespread breakthrough in AR: people were crowding with their phones under bridges, in restaurants, and on stairs of museums trying to collect the virtual creatures in real life settings. "'Pokémon Go' is hugely helpful in terms of awareness of AR among both consumers and the broader investment community," says Tim Merel, founder and CEO of Eyetouch Reality and Digi-Capital. "It could have far-reaching repercussions beyond...

“It is not surprising the Fed once again failed to take action as their expectations for economic growth were once again lowered. In fact, as I have noted previously, the Federal Reserve are the worst economic forecasters on the planet. As shown in the table/chart below, not only are the expectations for economic growth now the lowest on record, the Fed has given up on 2% growth for the economy with the long-run...

Ursula Nötzli Breinlinger: The topic of sustainability is very much in vogue. What should investors understand by the term "sustainable investing"? Béatrice Fischer: The aim of sustainable investing is to combine financial returns with positive repercussions for the environment and society. The investor strives to build up a comprehensive view that also includes non-financial factors. In investment decisions, the investor also takes into account sustainability aspects, i.e....

Why Robots? Robots are present not only where strength or precision is needed. With shrinking farmland, growing populations and the need to increase food supplies, agriculture is another field likely to benefit from robot use, such as driverless tractors, drones, or swarm robots for the harvest season. They could cut costs and be suitable even for indoor farming. According to the "Agricultural Robots" report by Tractica, by 2024 annual shipments of these robots are likely to...

As I noted on Thursday, the Fed non-announcement gave the bulls a reason to charge back into the markets as “accommodative monetary policy” is once again extended through the end of the year. Of course, it is not surprising the Fed once again failed to take action as their expectations for economic growth were once again lowered. Simply, with an economy failing to gain traction there is little ability for the Fed to...

Online sales juggernaut Amazon has a toe in the Internet finance business, processing payments and offering loans to the site’s merchants. What about its Chinese counterpart, Alibaba? It does those things, too. It also facilitates peer-to-peer lending, sells mutual funds and insurance policies, and has formed a private bank to lend to consumers. Who’s leading the Internet revolution now?   From a modest start in processing online payments, Alibaba, online media and entertainment firm...

Need a loan? You can always go to a bank. Or you can try to borrow from your peers. Increasingly popular “peer-to-peer lending portals” allow borrowers and lenders to connect directly through online marketplaces, threatening to disintermediate traditional financial institutions in the process. But how do peer-to-peer sites assess the risk involved in the loans they make? What role will regulation play in their future? Will institutional investors get on board? Industry experts discussed these...

With profitability at U.S. corporations touching historic highs, and corporate cash piles as large as they’ve ever been, one of the top tasks of executives these days is simply deciding how best to spend the money. Companies in the S&P 500 had an aggregate cash balance of $1.43 trillion in the second quarter of 2015, which tied a record set in the fourth quarter of 2014.   So what should companies be doing with all that money? In a recent white paper, Credit Suisse Corporate...

The third quarter wasn’t kind to U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 fell 6.4 percent, with stocks battered by everything from fears over China’s growth slowdown and financial market collapse to uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In June, the consensus view on third-quarter earnings was a 1 percent decline. Heading into earnings season, that figure has been revised downward to a 5 percent decrease. With the fourth quarter underway, none of the issues that...