Download PDF Inspire Brands – privately owned by Roark Capital Group Dunkin’ Brands Group (DNKN:NASDAQ) – market cap as of 13th November 2020: $8.7bn Introduction On the 30th of October 2020, Inspire Brands announced its commitment to acquire Dunkin’ Brands Group, one of the few franchising companies focused on coffee Read more…
Download PDF This article looks at the top trends impacting the semiconductor industry right now. 1. Moore’s law is hitting a brick wall Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years. This held true for several decades and became known as Moore’s Read more…
Download PDF US US stock market marks new record highs with the hopes rising for the soon vaccine development and investors’ look into the Biden’s victory on the US presidential elections. S&P500 closed at 3,585.15 with weekly gain of 2.16%. Dow-Jones Industrial Average Index (DJIA) was up 4.08% reaching 29,479.81. Read more…
Download PDF Introduction Banks finance themselves through a variety of different sources with different maturities and credit risk characteristics, for example through deposits, equity, short-term wholesale funding, long-term unsecured bonds, covered bonds, and asset-backed securities (ABSs). Hereunder a representation of the main long-term funding sources for a bank in their Read more…
Download PDF Tesco plc (LSE: TSCO) – market cap as of 13th November 2020: €22.00bn Charoen Pokphand Group Co. (Privately held) – estimated revenue in 2018: $63bn Introduction Early in 2020, Tesco solicited bids for its southeast Asian Operations. The British grocery chain was looking to simplify its business and Read more…
Download PDF In the COVID-19 induced chaos and disarray, numerous industries have been hit even harder than others. The energy sector in particular looks certain to undergo a severe, general transformation. Throughout this year the energy sector’s indexes in the US and Europe (S&P 500 energy and MSCI Europe energy) Read more…
Download PDF United States The US market certainly retains the main stage of financial attention, after the drop in the past few weeks that could have signalled investors’ fears ahead of the new election. However, this time around the equity markets saw a dramatic bull run, with the S&P 500 Read more…
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…