BSIC

The Ceiling Moved in July. The Numbers Have Not Caught Up.

Salzgitter AG (SZG GR): BUY
Target Price EUR 70, 26% Upside, 12 to 18 Month Horizon
Note: this piece was written in September 2026 with the shares trading at EUR 55.65, which is the reference price behind every multiple and every per share figure below. Sell side estimates cited are Deutsche Bank.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Quant

Beyond PnL: Reward Design and Context Management for LLM-Driven Strategy Research

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous research agents in quantitative finance: they read briefs, write strategy code, evaluate simulator output, and propose refinements in a loop.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Markets

Market Recap 20/09/2026

This week, the US equity market experienced considerable volatility, driven by oil prices, the Fed and AI safety concerns. At the start of the week, drone and shipping attacks near the Strait of Hormuz pushed WTI towards $106 per barrel by Tuesday, hitting equities. That revived inflation fears, pushing the 10-year Treasury yield up to near 5%. Additionally, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay on AI safety concerns…

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

3-2-1 Liftoff: The Launch of the Space Industry

The first space race raged between two economic superpowers one upping one another to demonstrate technological superiority. Half a century later, the space race is back on, however this time it is being led by privately owned companies rather than geopolitical superpowers.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Markets

Turn of the Tide, Part II: From Pension Promises to Curve Pressures

Around the same time last year, we published our first article covering the Dutch Pension Reform and its potential implications on markets. The Dutch pension reform appeared to offer a relatively clear opportunity in European rates markets. As pension funds moved away from defined-benefit promises, their need to hedge ultra-long liabilities was expected to decline.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

From Public Discount to Private Premium: Inside Britain’s Takeover Wave

Britain’s public markets are contracting in size. Years of underperforming listings, fund outflows, and the rise of sponsor takeovers have actively reduced the number of businesses listed in London, while at the same time the ones that remain continue to trade at a significant discount to their peers in the United States.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

Summer Deal Recap 2026

M&A touched record levels in H1 2026, but the market was increasingly defined by scale rather than breadth. The total value of announced deals hit $2.85tn in the first six months (LSEG), up 50% YoY and the highest year-to-date total since LSEG records began in 1980. Yet the total number announced fell 9% to 24,000 so far in 2026, a six-year low.

By BSIC, 5 days20 September 2026 ago

Quant

A Machine-Learning Regime-Switching Allocation System for ES Futures

Most systematic trading strategies apply fixed weights regardless of market conditions. A momentum fund stays long whether the market is trending or oscillating. This paper builds and tests a system that routes capital differently depending on which of four market regimes is active at any given time.

By BSIC, 2 weeks12 September 2026 ago

Markets

Market Recap 10/05/2026

US equity markets closed the week with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite both hitting fresh all-time highs on Friday, propelled by a stronger than expected April jobs report and continued AI earnings momentum, with the Nasdaq surging 4.51% on the week and the S&P 500 gaining 2.34%: marking the sixth consecutive winning week for both indices. The Dow lagged with a marginal +0.22% gain, dragged by Thursday’s broad sell-off.

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

Cheaper Debt or Weaker Guardrail? The Barclays Proposal Splitting the Bank of England

Download PDF Introduction The UK government will spend close to £111.2bn servicing its debt this year, more than the entire schools budget. With 30-year gilt yields at their highest since 1998 and the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom at just £23.6bn, the pressure on the public finances is not letting up. A Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Markets

Catching the Butterfly: A Relative Value Approach in OIS Curves

Download PDF Introduction Principal component analysis is widely used for explaining and hedging in the interest rates markets due to its construction based on orthogonality which pairs well with the multicollinearity prevalent in rates. Its explanatory power is able to consistently explain over 95% of the variance in yield curve Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Markets

A Physics – Based Model of Returns: Anomalous Scaling and Irreversibility

Download PDF Abstract Every empirical study of financial returns since Mandelbrot (1963) has converged on the same short list of stylized facts: heavy polynomial tails, anomalous scaling of volatility with the aggregation horizon, power-law persistence of absolute returns, multiscaling across moment orders, and vanishing linear autocorrelation. These regularities are robust Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

From Channels to Companies: Private Equity and the Creator Economy

Download PDF Introduction “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” Bill Gates wrote that in January 1996, in an essay better remembered for its three-word title, Content is King, than for the prediction itself. Three Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Corporate Finance

The AI Stack: Who Will Capture the Profits?

Download PDF Introduction The AI trade is no longer behaving as one single boom, as the debate over which parts of the industry will actually capture the profits has intensified among investors. After two years in which artificial intelligence pushed valuations higher across semiconductors, cloud platforms, model labs, and enterprise Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months10 May 2026 ago

Markets

Relative Value in Rates: presenting and challenging the Gauss+ model

Download PDF In this article, we introduce the Gauss+ model for the yield curve. The model belongs to a wider class of models called Affine Term Structure Models (ATSMs) which serve the purpose of modelling the short rate for the pricing of risk-free term structures. These models typically link the Read more…

By BSIC, 5 months3 May 2026 ago

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