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Leading accounting academic receives Lifetime Award
economia The American Accounting Association (AAA) has recognised professor of accountancy and honorary member of the ICAEW, Stephen Zeff, for his contribution to the profession. Zeff, who is Keith Anderson professor of accounting at Rice Jones Graduate School … |
June 14, 2017 at 05:49PM
from
The latest read on retail sales in the US will be out at 8:30 a.m. ET.
Economists forecast that retail sales held flat in May, according to Bloomberg data.
Excluding gas and auto sales, economists forecast sales rose 0.3% month-over-month.
Last month, sales rose 0.4% month-over-month, according to the Commerce Department, below expectations of a 0.6% jump.
Refresh this page for updatest at 8:30 a.m. ET.
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NOW WATCH: An economist explains the key issues that Trump needs to address to boost the economy
June 14, 2017 at 05:30PM
from Elena Holodny
June 14, 2017 at 05:22PM
from Harriet Alexander
June 14, 2017 at 05:22PM
from Telegraph Reporters
Charleston Post Courier |
Charleston-based accounting startup Ceterus raises $6 million in investments
Charleston Post Courier Ceterus chief executive Levi Morehouse pitches his company’s technology-focused model of accounting at the Dig South conference. The company says it has raised $6 million in investments, bringing it to a total of $10.2 million of venture capital funding. |
June 14, 2017 at 04:35PM
from
Welcome back to “CIO Career Coach,” a video series I created with CIO.com and IDG.tv. This season, we’re discussing the skills that top CIOs are developing to be successful in the new era of IT.
In this episode we are talking about shadow IT and how CIOs can shift their approach from trying to rein in a pesky problem to thinking of shadow IT as “end user innovation.”
Ten years ago, the term “shadow IT” described the staff that your business partners hired to develop their own solutions. But today, with cloud services, shadow IT is a much larger concept. It occurs whenever a business partner buys a cloud application without consulting IT.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
June 14, 2017 at 05:04PM
from Martha Heller
“My smaller, loose receipts get shoved into a lovely little tissue box. When it gets to be tax season, I dump it out and sort appropriately. Not exactly organized but organized-ish.”
June 14, 2017 at 03:46PM
from Team Rockstar
Del Wright (Valparaiso) has accepted a lateral offer to join the University of Missouri Kansas City Law School faculty. Del’s recent publications include: Bogus Refunds & Bad Penalties: The Feckless and Fixable Refund Penalty System, 48 Akron L. Rev. ___ (2015) Improperly Burdened: The Uncertain and Sometimes Unfair Application of…
June 14, 2017 at 04:14PM
from Paul Caron
Cannes Lions managing director Jose Papa writes on how a meeting of these minds is business-critical for advertisers in 2017.
The suggestion that people are either left- or right-brained has long since been disproven, but today we still persist with the idea that each of us must naturally be hardwired to be “creative” or “logical.”
June 14, 2017 at 04:18PM
from Jose Papa
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Transformations are no longer limited to beating the competition to market — they involve significant organizational reconstruction.
June 14, 2017 at 04:02PM
from Forbes Coaches Council, CommunityVoice
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You already know what you need to do to accomplish something. So what’s holding you back from actually starting?
June 14, 2017 at 04:02PM
from Forbes Coaches Council, CommunityVoice
Great leaders are hard to come by. In every age, there is a leader born that shapes the world. What we are today and the wealth of comforts that are at our disposal is owed largely to some leader. He may have been a leader who was tech-drive or…
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June 14, 2017 at 03:50PM
from Featured columnists
June 14, 2017 at 03:42PM
from Telegraph Reporters
June 14, 2017 at 03:42PM
from Telegraph Reporters
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Overhaul would kill test failed by eight banks in past three years
June 14, 2017 at 03:49PM
from
Tide’s small business members reveal the ways in which high street banks are not set-up for the needs of today’s SMEs
Tide, the mobile-first business banking service today releases new insights from its SME community that identifies the top five reasons that they feel high street banks aren’t suitable for the needs of today’s small businesses.
Setting up a business account is confusing and time consuming: High street banks request endless documents to SMEs before they can start sending and receiving money. If providing proof of ID, tax identification numbers, turnover and capital requirements wasn’t enough, it can take up to 2.6 weeks to set up a business bank account with the big five high street banks according to Tide’s previous research. This is time that a small business cannot afford to waste.
High street banks are inaccessible: When it comes to trying to visit an advisor at a high street bank; Tide’s previous research found that on average it takes an SME just under three weeks to get a meeting in the UK, with Londoners having to wait on average five weeks (37 days).
SMEs need anytime, anywhere access: Small businesses, and particularly freelancers and consultants, are constantly on the move for work and they need the banking infrastructure to do things on the go. The innovation that has happened in consumer banking, where now a user can make transfers on mobile rather than just check on funds, hasn’t quite stretched to business accounts. Current online business services do not offer the functionality that SMEs need.
Foreign nationals struggle to get an account: It is near impossible for a foreign national who has set up a company or is freelancing within the UK, to set up an account. This is a significant problem when taking into account research that estimates 14% of start-up businesses in the UK were founded by immigrant entrepreneurs.
Traditional business banking is unnecessarily expensive: High street banks charge monthly fees for just keeping a bank account and extortionate fees for additional services, for example when spending money abroad. Once banks have you as a current account customer, they try to cross-sell you their other financial products, which tend to be expensive and not tailored to small businesses.
George Bevis, founder of Tide, comments: “High street banking for SMEs is inherently slow and outdated for the needs of the modern small business. For many start-ups, for whom time and money are scarce resources , having an easy-to-access and cost-effective service can be business critical.
Whilst their online offering may sometimes be sufficient for consumer banking, the existing online business banking tools offered by high street banks are not good enough for businesses. Now is the time more than ever for SMEs to look to dedicated online and mobile services rather than stick with the traditional banking system that is not meeting their needs.”
June 14, 2017 at 03:35PM
from Dylan Jones
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These mesmerizing, balancing tops are the latest craze among kids. Some say they are effective in improving concentration awhile others just buy the toy for their kids because they don’t want them to be the only ones without them. Cartoon by Ed Hall.
June 14, 2017 at 03:31PM
from Cartoon Of The Day, Contributor
ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, are emerging as extremely popular investments.
The funds are designed to track a specific set of stocks, commodity or another group of assets. The idea is that investors can diversify their portfolios by simply investing in a single fund, rather than each of the individual assets the fund invests in.
Investors have been pouring money into ETFs recently, sometimes billions of dollars a week.
The combined investment in ETFs was recently measured at $2.7 trillion. As of February 2, passive investments like ETFs and index funds accounted for 28.5% of assets under management in the US. That share is expected to grow to more than 50% by 2024 at the latest, according to a Moody’s forecast.
ETFs are not just popular for small and individual investors, as hedge funds are big investors in the funds as well, according to a report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The report, authored by Jue Xiong and Stephen Suttmeier, ranked 25 exchange-traded funds owned by hedge funds by the size of the investment by hedge funds in the ETFs. The ETFs cover everything from equity markets to gold.
Below, the top 17 funds are listed in net market value of hedge funds’ investments.
Read below to find out which funds made the list…
Ticker: OEF
Net market value: $136.300,000
Market Cap: $4,613,030,000
% of invested hedge funds: 2.96%
Source: BAML
Ticker: DXJ
Net market value: $139,780,000
Market Cap: $8,448,480,000
% of invested hedge funds: 1.65%
Source: BAML
Ticker: BND
Net market value: $147,220,000
Market Cap: $33,074,400,000
% of invested hedge funds: 0.45%
Source: BAML
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
June 14, 2017 at 03:28PM
from Seth Archer
A familiar story played out in the market this week as a sharp two-day decline in tech stocks quickly reversed.
It was the latest example of an equity market shock being quickly forgotten, with investors using weakness as an opportunity to buy.
The short-lived sell-off certainly didn’t trouble Diane Jaffee, senior portfolio manager at TCW Group, which oversees $195 billion.
Jaffee runs a handful of value-focused strategies and funds at TCW. In other words, she’s out there looking for bargains — but only if the underlying company’s fundamentals are up to snuff.
In an interview with Business Insider, Jaffee spoke about the tech sell-off, earnings growth, stock valuations and market conditions for active managers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Joe Ciolli: What’s your take on the tech sell-off we saw on Friday and into Monday? Is it something to be worried about, or is it just another patch of weakness that allows for opportunistic dip buying?
Diane Jaffee: I wouldn’t be surprised if that was just a little nervous selling as we awaited second-quarter earnings results. We shouldn’t get so hung up on just a little bit of market rebalancing. We’re so used to this luxurious feeling of very little volatility, but as an active manager we like for things to bounce around, to make sure everyone does their homework.
The year-over-year earnings growth rate for tech was, on average, over 30% in the first quarter. The estimates for 2017 are supposed to come down. So the sell-off in technology had some merit. But it was a controlled sell-off. It wasn’t a throw out the baby with the bath water kind of thing. It’s very over-owned.
Micron is reporting this week. As one of the backbones of the technology world, investors will be watching their results closely.
We believe that technology is a vastly important sector for the US economy. It’s something that we pay attention to not only on a macro basis, but also from a bottom-up valuation perspective.
Ciolli: It sounds like you view earnings growth as an important driver. But does it trump all else? Is it truly the bull market backstop?
Jaffee: It’s incredibly important, and technology was a big leader for the market in the first quarter. Earnings growth is really what’s holding up the market right now.
Ciolli: Since you build so much of your strategy around valuation, what are your preferred metrics?
Jaffee: As a value-oriented manager, a company has to meet at least one of our five valuation factors. Generally speaking, they have to meet three or more.
We do a statistical correlation analysis to determine significance. For many technology companies in the software space, price-to-sales is the most important. They rarely meet our five valuation factors because they’re so heady on a price-to-sales basis.
In the hardware space, we find that price-to-book is the most significant. It’s interesting that a sector like technology has different sub-industries that are valued on different measures. And, of course, price-to-earnings ratio can sometimes work.
Ciolli: There’s data showing that while tech got smoked for two days, the broader market was resilient. This has been attributed to a rotation into areas like financials and energy. What do you make of this rotation?
Jaffee: The rotation bodes very well for value. In fact, through the end of May, the differential between value and growth hit almost one standard deviation, year-to-date. This is still very much an active management market — in particular for value. Money started falling into areas like financials, energy and industrials, all areas that we’re overweight.
We stress test every bottom-up stock story. For the energy space, we use an average WTI crude price of $40 for the next one to two years. Any energy stock in our portfolio has to be able to withstand that, among other things like balance sheet strength and company-specific catalysts. You want to be prudent, but we’re slightly overweight.
Ciolli: You’ve mentioned that this is a good environment for active management. Are there dislocations occurring in the market, where stocks are trading more independently?
Jaffee: Absolutely. Correlations have come down this year among both stocks and sectors. That provides buying opportunities across the board.
Ciolli: What are your specific sector calls? What about specific companies?
Jaffee: We’re overweight industrials, materials and energy. We’re equal-weight consumer discretionary. And we’re underweight consumer staples, healthcare, real estate, telecom and utilities.
Technology is an underweight versus the S&P 500. There are some names that don’t meet any of our five valuation characteristics: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google.
In our top 10, we own Cisco and Microsoft. They’re finding new ways to interact with new technologies. With Cisco it’s through the security cloud, and with Microsoft it’s through their Azure cloud database.
Ciolli: More philosophically, what’s the best piece of advice you can give to an investor just starting out right now?
Jaffee: I determined early on that it was a good idea to be a student of market history — to try and get as much knowledge as I could about prior cycles. Not just the last three to five years, but during different time periods. Like Mark Twain said, the song might be a little different, but the melody is the same.
History provides the quantitative framework we use for everything. Our team has gone through many cycles together, which gives us a good idea of how to think about the current environment. Even on a stock-specific level, when we do our regression analysis, we go back 25-plus years to see the different timeframes.
It feels a lot like the 1990s, when volatility was in the low-20s for nearly a decade, and economic growth was similarly anemic to what we’re seeing now. But it was one of the best equity markets ever. It helps when we’re looking at individual companies, like General Electric, which is in our top 10. This company has a more than 100-year history. We know the framework to be able to evaluate various situations.
SEE ALSO: The CIO of a $114 billion investment firm sees ‘stormy weather’ ahead for stocks
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NOW WATCH: An economist explains the key issues that Trump needs to address to boost the economy
June 14, 2017 at 03:28PM
from Joe Ciolli
