Dropbox Inc. (NASDAQ:DBX) – market cap as of 13/04/2018: €11.8bn Introduction Founded in 2007, Dropbox is the leading pure-play cloud storage and collaboration platform. Its mission is to “unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working”. Dropbox is focused on reducing the amount of time Read more…
In the current increasing interest rate environment, the debate about the controversial but nevertheless important benchmark has sparked off again. This is why, we thought it relevant to provide in the following article a refresher on the history and functioning of the London Interbank Offered Rate, as well as examine Read more…
Introduction The 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and subsequent Great Recession pushed the US Federal Reserve to deploy two main tools of monetary interventionism: 1) Quantitative Easing (QE) 2) Reduction of the federal funds rate to unprecedented historical lows The Federal Reserve began purchasing both sovereign and corporate bonds in Read more…
US The US equity market has witnessed a lot of volatility during last week. The trade war with China has weighed on all the three major indices: S&P 500 lost 1.38%, Nasdaq and Dow Jones scored -2.10% and -0.71% respectively. On Monday, the slide of some big Tech firms led Read more…
Siemens AG (ETR: SIE) – market cap as of 06/04/2018: €88.8bn Siemens Healthineers AG (ETR: SHL) – market cap as of 06/04/2018: €33.9bn Introduction On March 16, 2018, the German conglomerate Siemens performed an initial public offering of its principal and second most profitable division, Healthineers, on the Frankfurt Stock Read more…
What is real estate Real estate is a physical ‘bricks and mortar’ investment, where income and value are driven by rents that are paid by tenants under contractually-binding leases. Its subsectors include office, retail, multifamily, industrial, self-storage and hospitality. The main sources of real asset cash flows are derived from Read more…
Innogy SE (ETR: IGY) – market cap as of 06/04/2018: €21.2bn E.On SE (ETR: EOAN) – market cap as of 06/04/2018: €19.9bn RWE AG (ETR: RWE) – market cap as of 06/04/2018: €12.2bn Introduction On March 10th, German electricity-utility company RWE announced it had reached an agreement to sell a Read more…
CIGNA Corporation (NYSE:CI) – market cap as of 09/03/2018: $42.7bn Express Scripts Holding Co (NASDAQ:ESRX) – market cap as of 09/03/2018: $45.7bn Introduction On March 8, 2018, Cigna Corporation announced the acquisition of Express Scripts Holding for a cash and stock consideration of $67bn. The combination of Cigna – a Read more…
XL Group Ltd (NYSE:XL) – market cap as of 09/03/2018: $14.4bn Axa SA (EPA:CS) – market cap as of 09/03/2018: €54.5bn Introduction On the March 5, 2018, the French insurer Axa announced its intention to buy 100% of Bermuda-based XL Group, which also operates in the insurance industry, for $57.6/share. Read more…
Laird plc (LON: LRD) – market cap as of 09/03/18: £979.8 m Introduction On March 1, 2018, Advent International announced it will acquire the UK electronic components producer Laird plc for £1.2bn, or £2/share. The deal marks yet another conquest for private equity firms in search for viable targets to Read more…
Introduction In the midst of a particularly cold North American winter induced by an unexpected southwards movement of the polar vertex in late December 2017, New York Harbor Heating Oil surged nearly 15% from its December low through the end of January. This important petroleum middle distillate often used for Read more…
Introduction To maximise our profit when investing in financial instruments we try to rely on analysis of the underlying values, macroeconomic trends and possibly other quantitative methods. However, as much as we try to optimise our returns, we often fail to do so, as we fall prey to our own Read more…
US Continuing a monthly streak of surprises, after gapping down -0.66% immediately after Gary Cohn’s resignation as economic advisor of the current US administration, the S&P recovered, increasing 3.25% weekly. In particular all the major indexes rallied (Dow +1,77%, S&P +1,74%, Nasdaq +1,93%) on Friday as non-farm payrolls were 313k Read more…
Macro Environment 2018 is bound to be the point of inflection for the Greek economy. The Bank of Greece reports that GDP will grow 2.5% over the next two years, while the European Commission expects a 1.6% growth in 2017 – the economy’s best performance in a decade. Greece’s 10-year Read more…
The Theory Behind the Implied Vol Jump The classical Black-Scholes model for option pricing assumes that stock prices follow a Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) with constant drift and, more relevant for the scope of this article, constant volatility (σ). Analytically: where r is the risk-free rate, q is dividend yield Read more…