Two positive and painless adjustments to the federal government’s new policy on income trust taxation could remove the disadvantage currently faced by the country’s pension plans and put conventional firms and trusts on a level playing field, a paper from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests. PwC proposes two adjustments to the October 31, 2006, federal Tax Fairness Plan: […]
The Ironworkers Ontario Pension Fund is demanding that Research In Motion get independent outsiders to review stock options grants, according to a newspaper report. The fund owns $2 million worth of the BlackBerry-maker’s stock and wants someone other than the audit committee to conduct the investigation. It says the directors on RIM’s board are not […]
There is room for improvement with this popular asset-pricing model. The Capital Asset Pricing Model(CAPM)is the most well-known asset-pricing model. It was the first attempt to analyze the equilibrium implications of investing under conditions of uncertainty. It provided a platform for all the subsequent work in asset pricing. The model can be expressed as: E(Ri)- […]
Comparing principles-based and rules-based corporate governance in Canada and the U.S. Following the collapse of Enron and other accounting fraud and corporate scandals involving firms such as Global Crossing, Adelphia, Tyco and WorldCom, and in light of the demise of Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002(SOX)was signed […]
The predictive power and economic effectiveness of trading strategies. The moving average is considered to be an effective tool to reveal trends. It ostensibly removes noise and smoothes underlying data by averaging a chosen number of observations. It is employed in various market forecasting models and trading strategies which exploit well-documented low-order serial correlation and […]
Most thought hedge funds were a passing trend, but they have proven to be valuable trading vehicles. Few pension plans, particularly in Canada, had dipped their investment toes into the hedge fund pool 10 years ago. Academics had mixed pronouncements and the limited media coverage generally portrayed hedge funds as speculative, volatile and usually secretive […]
Despite growing interest in liability driven investing among plan sponsors worldwide, there is still confusion about what LDI actually entails, how associated strategies should be implemented and how to determine its true value proposition to plan sponsors. “The term LDI means different things to different plan sponsors. To some of the 140 plan sponsors we […]
The persistence and causes of the January effect. True or false. Compared to the rest of the year, January is the month with the strongest stock market performance. The answer, called the “January effect,” depends on three factors. The first is the time period being considered when calculating average monthly returns of a given portfolio […]
Multinational corporations, environmental standards, and market value. Multinational companies are important pieces of the world’s economy. The largest multinationals, in fact, have revenues that exceed the Gross Domestic Products of most countries. For example, Exxon’s 2005 revenues of nearly US$340 billion would rank it in the top 30 economic entities in the world, ahead of […]
What do we know about terrorism and the financial markets? On January 12, 2006, four Royal Dutch Shell workers in the Baylesa province of the Niger Delta region were kidnapped by members of a militia group, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta(MEND), who called for the release of a former governor currently indicted […]