Download PDF Introduction On October 8th, 2020, Morgan Stanley announced its acquisition of Eaton Vance Corp., a publicly listed, Boston-based asset manager with over $500bn in AUM. The firm will acquire all the shares of Eaton Vance on a 50% cash-50% stock basis. Based on Morgan Stanley’s share price on Read more…
Introduction On November 5th, the world’s highest-valued fintech company, Ant Group, had plans to list its shares on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Stock Exchanges in the largest IPO in history, aiming to raise a total of $37bn and to surpass Saudi Aramco’s record of $29bn from December last year. Read more…
Download PDF Introduction This article explores the short-term commercial financing landscape and the most important financial instruments therein. We elaborate on how the coronavirus affected short-term financing of SMEs and how institutions intervened to avoid large scale insolvencies. Subsequently, we detail the most important practices within trade finance and in Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Traditionally, the carry factor has been associated with a trading strategy in the FX markets. For decades, practitioners and academics have thoroughly studied the phenomenon by which currency speculators were regularly profiting from deviations from the uncovered interest parity condition. Borrowing in a low-interest rates currency Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Passive management as it is known nowadays was born in the 60’s and the 70’s. By that time, it was already clear that actively managed funds tended to underperform market indexes. For this reason, Nobel Laurate Paul Samuelson urged the investment management industry to develop a “portfolio Read more…
Download PDF United States Many US markets have seen the roughest week since March; the Dow and S&P 500 indices are down 7.5% and 6.4% respectively and the Nasdaq fell over 6% (following a sharp selloff in technology stocks due to mixed earnings results, with Apple falling 5.5% after a Read more…
Download PDF The Telco Business The importance of the telecom industry has been brought to light in recent months as the global pandemic forced millions to work from home resulting in huge increases in reliance on mobile phone networks and broadband. The telecommunication sector, as a whole, can be Read more…
Download PDF Nexi (BIT:NEXI) – market cap as of 30th October 2020: €8.41bn SIA Group – Private Company Introduction On the 5th of October 2020, Nexi SpA and SIA SpA, two Italian financial companies specialising in payment solutions, announced a €15bn all-share merger, creating an Italian PayTech champion. Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Variance swaps are OTC derivatives that allow investors to get direct exposure to the volatility of an underlying product, such as stock indexes, exchange rates and other asset classes. They initially gained popularity during the early 2000s following the advances in derivatives pricing theory. Their pure exposure Read more…
Download PDF London Stock Exchange Group(LON:LSE) – market cap as of 30th October 2020: £29.13bn Euronext (EPA:ENX) – market cap as of 30th October 2020: €6.23bn Introduction After long talks, The London Stock Exchange announced on Friday the 9 of October 2020 it will sell Borsa Italiana to Euronext Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Once again, the United States are at a crossroad. Pitted against each other, American citizens will have to cast a vote on what many political observers believe to be one of the most divisive elections in recent times. As the ballots roll in, financial markets will Read more…
Download PDF United States This week the S&P 500 index experienced its biggest weekly gain in three months, going up by 3.84% and closing at 3,477.13, slightly more than the +3.27% characterizing the Dow Jones that finished its rally at 28,586.90. Generally speaking, volatility appears to have decreased across the Read more…
Download PDF Introduction In the past year Berkshire Hathaway slowly built a 5% stake in each of the 5 most important trading houses in Japan. The overall size of the transaction is ¥670bn ($6.3bn) and it was backed by a surprising ¥625.5 billion issuance of yen-denominated bonds made in September Read more…
Download PDF Introduction In this article we are going to provide an overview of the gaming industry and its trends starting from the more traditional console and pc which are moving toward the cloud, to the newest trends in the mobile gaming, such as hyper-casual games, to then finish with Read more…
Download PDF Devon Energy Corporation (DVN:NYSE) – market cap as of 9/10/2020: €3.9bn WPX Energy Inc. (WPX:NYSE) – market cap as of 9/10/2020: €3.0bn Introduction Following months of global lockdown and a fierce oil price war hitting highly indebted American oil producers, a new wave of consolidation in the Read more…