Risky IPTV Investment

IPTV （Internet Protocol television） is a frequently mentioned word recently, since Shanda changes its main business to IPTV, which isrecognized as a new technology and at- tractive business in the future. Shanda is the most active Chinese online game pioneer, it has produced one trail box, which will be used as the host while traditional TV station as terminal of the IPTV. Shanda hopes that the box＇s development and the family entertainment service operation will boost its revenue and help to recover the investors＇ confidence. It is estimated that Shanda has spend about $450 millions on IPTV in the last year, including production research and sales channel establishment. However, it is reported that the box is of poor quality. Even the internal trial members complained about the box＇s unsatisfactory performance. In addition, the price of the box is about 6,000 RMB each （equivalent US $ 800）, it is too expen-sive to most Chinese consumers.     

Investment Trends投资风标

AX Trading Group获2000万美元融资
　　2016年10月27日，AX Trading Group,Inc.宣布达成一项协议，获得2000万美元投资。投资的来源和条款未披露。此项交易是该公司拓展全球市场地位的一系列预期战略举措的第一步。这项投资将让AX能够将其全球技术业务版图扩大至欧洲和亚洲。利用专有的AX技术，全球各地的市场参与者可以高效地取得流动性，同时降低成本。AX Trading Network（AX交易网络）是市场首个“电子交易网络”(E T N)，让机构交易者能够在一个安全的环境下与其它交易对手积极联系和交易。     

Investment Trends投资风标

华润啤酒付出16亿美元控股雪花2016年10月11日，华润啤酒宣布，已完成对南非米勒所持雪花啤酒49%股权的收购，华润雪花啤酒成为该公司的全资附属公司。为此，华润啤酒付出了16亿美元的代价。两大巨头的合并，诞生了一个全球啤酒市场份额达30%的巨无霸企业。百威英博的官方资料显示，合并后的公司仍然叫百威英博。2015年11月，这起“世纪大并购”对外宣布，随后，剧情跌宕、持续上演近一年。到了2016年7月29日，中国商务部有条件批准并购交易，使得相应审批条件基本满足。     

投资风标Investment Trends

据华尔街日报援引知情人士消息,大众点评网近日已获得8.5亿美元投资,本轮融资对大众点评的估值达40.5亿美元,融资规模居中国创业公司第二位,仅次于小米的11亿美元。据悉,本轮融资的投资者包括小米、腾讯、淡马锡控股、万达集团和复星集团。随着生活服务O2O的发展进程,大众点评在各条业务线的脚步也开始加快。此前,大众点评负责人表示,大众点评2015年的目标交易额为人民币700亿元,收入目标为人民币20亿元。     

What Moves Investment Growth?

We use accounting identities to decompose unexpected changes in investment growth into surprises to current cash‐flow growth and stock returns, and revisions of expectations about future cash‐flow growth and future discount rates. Using a vector autoregressive model we find that current cash‐flow surprises account for the largest element of the variance decomposition. Investment growth and current cash‐flow surprises are negatively correlated with news about future cash‐flow growth, which can be expected from persistent productivity shocks and decreasing returns to scale. We find little evidence of a discount rate channel for investment since return terms are small and have unintuitive signs.     

Do Investment Newsletters Move Markets?

We analyze the market impact of stock recommendations made by a single investment newsletter that focuses on instances of heavy insider trading. The market reacts positively to the actual insider trades and the associated Form 4 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings that attracted the newsletter's interest. The subsequent recommendations, which occur within a delay of several days, are associated with an even larger announcement period return and higher trade volume. Thus, despite the fact that recommendations are largely based on publicly available information on insider trades and the reach of the newsletter is limited, the newsletter has a significant impact on the market.     

The Next Hot Field for Investment

Recently, global investment hotspot focuses on four economic areas-China, India, Russia and Brazil which is called BRICs. Being the most shining star among those four countries in recent 5 years, China holds the biggest consumption market. The Chinese IT and electronics manufacturing industry has became the biggest industry, ranked third in world market. Where will be the next hot field for investment, China, India, Russia or any other region？     

＇Web 2.0＇ Investment at All-Time Highs

Venture capital firms invested more money than ever before in ＂information services＂ companies in Mainland China, as overall venture investment produced 55 deals and reached $560 million during the second quarter of 2007, a 49% increase over the $375 million invested in the first quarter of the year, according to the China Quarterly Venture Capital Report released by Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst ＆ Young. In fact, the report shows a 100% increase over the first quarter in the amount of money invested in ＂information services,＂ which include blogs.[第一段]     

Do Analysts Influence Corporate Financing and Investment?

We examine whether abnormal analyst coverage influences the external financing and investment decisions of the firm. Controlling for self-selection bias in analysts' excessive coverage, we find that firms with high (low) analyst coverage consistently engage in higher (lower) external financing than do their industry peers of similar size. Our evidence also demonstrates that firms with excessive analyst coverage overinvest and realize lower future returns than do firms with low analyst coverage. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that analysts favor the coverage of firms that have the potential to engage in profitable investment-banking business.     

Investment by German Firms Abroad—Unpatriotic?

Original Papers

Investment by German Firms Abroad—Unpatriotic?     

Investment bank monitoring and bonding of security analysts’ research

We assess investment banks’ influence over the agreement between their analysts’ research behavior and their clients’ interests, in the post-reform era. Competing banks discipline their analysts with worse career outcomes for producing biased reports, issuing shirking reports, and for involvement in the earnings guidance game, showing meaningful monitoring of their analysts. Highly reputable banks provide more monitoring discipline of their analysts and bonding of their moral hazard than other banks. The findings agree with the banks taking responsibility for aligning analysts’ behavior with clients’ interests.     

What is an Investment Project's Implied Rate of Return?

How to measure a project's implied rate of return has long been an unresolved problem, except for some special cases. This paper derives return on present cost (ROPC) as the correct measure of an investment project's implied rate of return. The IRR is a biased measure except for projects classified as simple projects, and this bias is likely to be substantial in many real‐world applications. Thus while net present values should be used to determine whether to accept/reject projects, I recommend that analysts use ROPC in place of the IRR as a measure of a project's true rate of return.     

What Do Investment Banks Truly Bring to the Table?

This paper investigates the role of intermediaries in the initial public offering (IPO) process. In the U.S. market, investment banks have traditionally been involved in a firm‐commitment or best‐efforts underwriting capacity. However, in the Australian IPO market, investment banks are increasingly being named in association with new issues in diverse roles such as issue managers, sponsoring brokers and corporate advisers. Using a sample of 468 IPOs over the 1996 to mid‐2006 period, we examine the influence of investment banks across these different engagements. In support of the signalling and information production roles of intermediaries, we find that issuers choosing high intermediary involvement are typically older, retain more capital, seek to raise larger amounts of capital and are without independent expert certification. We find mixed support for the certification hypothesis when testing for the effect of intermediary reputation on IPO issuer wealth loss. Further, the impact of intermediary involvement on underpricing is not significantly different for the different levels of intermediary involvement once issue characteristics have been accounted for. This is puzzling since these different roles by definition do not provide the same level of issue quality assurance.     

The Impact of Enterprises’ Shadow Banking Activities on Business Performance: A Test Based on Mediator Effect of Investment Scale and Investment Efficiency

ABSTRACT

In recent years, China’s financial sector has gradually been alienated from the real sector, allowing financial innovation and regulatory arbitrage add their own value to finance. High interest rates in the financial industry have led to changes in the real sector, revealing a trend toward “financialization” and “quasi-financialization”; a typical example of this includes nonfinancial enterprises’ shadow banking activities. In this article, we use annual data from 2004 to 2015 of A share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, to examine the influence of nonfinancial enterprises’ shadow banking activities on business performance. The results show that, overall, enterprises’ shadow banking activity improve operating performance. In addition, from the perspective of earning structure, nonfinancial enterprises’ shadow banking business increases financial benefits, but has a significantly negative effect on operating income. Further tests show that enterprises engaged in shadow banking activities will impact operating income through the two intermediary variables of investment scale and investment efficiency. However, the negative effect of investment in crowding out operating income is greater than that of the efficiency-improving effect on operating income. This article provides policy guidance in terms of recognizing diverse aspects of shadow banking system that divorce the real economy from the financial economy.     

Are Analysts’ Recommendations for Other Investment Banks Biased?

This paper provides evidence of a “Potential conflict of interest by equity analysts” who issue recommendations for investment banks that are related to their own bank through syndication. Analysts issue significantly more optimistic recommendations for investment banks with which their bank is syndicated. Recommending banks upgrade their recommendations just before a relation is initiated, suggesting that they use analyst optimism as a means of currying favor with the syndicate lead in hopes of being invited to join. It also appears that as part of a quid pro quo of sorts, relatively optimistic recommendations are rewarded with more syndicate appointments in the year after the recommendations.     

Why Invest in Your Neighbor? Social Contract on Educational Investment

It may be in the interestof low-ability individuals to subsidize the education of high-abilityindividuals. The sufficient conditions are surprisingly mild:positive externalities in education and complementarity in productionbetween human capital and labor supplied by the low-ability individuals.However, tax competition and the free mobility of the educatedgive rise to time-inconsistency and free-riding problems whichrender such a social contract infeasible and result in a suboptimallylow investment in education.     

What's in a Name? An Experimental Examination of Investment Behavior

A fundamental unresolved issue is whether information asymmetries underlie investors predisposition to invest close to home (i.e., domestically or locally). We conduct experiments in the United States and Canada to investigate agents portfolio allocation decisions, controlling for the availability of information. Providing participants with information about a firms home base, without disclosing its specific identity, is not sufficient to change investment behavior. Rather, participants need to know a firms name and home base. Additional evidence indicates that participants have a greater perceived familiarity with local and domestic securities and, in turn, invest more in such securities.The authors thank Ann Gillette, Josef Zechner (the editor), and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and acknowledge the financial support of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System.     

What is the Economic Cost of the Investment Home Bias?

Overinvesting domestically is well known as an investment home bias (IHB). We define an economic home bias (EHB), whereby the IHB measures the investment weights and the EHB measures the economic cost induced by the IHB. We may have a large IHB and a negligible EHB. With the increase in the average correlation between foreign markets from 0.4 for the decade ending in 1988 to about 0.9 for more recent decades, the U.S. EHB is becoming negligible despite the domestic investment of 77.5%. Since 2009, the correlations have decreased, indicating that the HB puzzle is emerging once again.     

Picking Winners? Investment Consultants’ Recommendations of Fund Managers

Investment consultants advise institutional investors on their choice of fund manager. Focusing on U.S. actively managed equity funds, we analyze the factors that drive consultants’ recommendations, what impact these recommendations have on flows, and how well the recommended funds perform. We find that investment consultants’ recommendations of funds are driven largely by soft factors, rather than the funds’ past performance, and that their recommendations have a significant effect on fund flows. However, we find no evidence that these recommendations add value, suggesting that the search for winners, encouraged and guided by investment consultants, is fruitless.