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• Tuesday, 22 May 2012

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• Wall Street Indexes, Auto Industry, Housing Market at Year End - 29 December 2011

As 2011 draws to a close, Europe's debt problems remain in the spotlight for anxious Wall Street investors, resulting in stocks being down by more than one percent at close of business Wednesday. Trading volumes have been light in this last week of the year, and with few economic and corporate reports due it is doubtful that this light trading trend will change until the New Year. Analysts have noted that recent market movement is likely to have been influenced by investors taking stock of their investment portfolios and taking action to balance these in preparation for 2012.

• US Job Market, Europe Crisis, Earnings of Interest in Week Ahead - 31 October 2011

With analysts warning that the current climate of market uncertainty is far from over, it appears that Wall Street is set to end the month of October on a high, with the Dow recording the greatest October gain ever. Despite the fact that French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been reported as saying that Greece should never have been permitted entrance to the Eurozone in 2001, European authorities have reached an agreement and mapped out a plan to rescue ailing European countries, including Greece, Italy and Spain. This has done much to boost confidence among Wall Street investors who will continue to keep an alert eye on Europe as leaders of nations forming the G-20 gather in Cannes, with the debt crisis a highlight on the agenda for discussion.

• Is the "Kodak Moment" Fading? - 29 September 2011

The brand name Kodak is synonymous with occasions we want memorialized, and the term "Kodak moment" is readily understood to describe a moment in time that either has been, or should have been, captured on film. Used as a promotional gimmick back in 2008, the "Kodak moment" concept has become part of our vocabulary. But the digital world has eclipsed the traditional world of photography, and it is becoming quite rare for photographers to use film that needs to be developed and printed. While the majority of photographers may still make use of a professional service to print their memories, home printing is becoming more popular and using a computer or mobile device and social media sites as a photo album is now commonplace.

• Wall Street Rocked by Disappointing May Jobs Report - 6 June 2011

Analysts are anticipating volatility on Wall Street in the upcoming week, as investors come to grips with Friday's dismal jobs report which noted that only 54,000 jobs were created in the month of May as compared to April's figure of 232,000. This came as a huge disappointment to economists who have estimated that the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs each month purely to keep up with population growth. Jobs over and above that figure would be addressing the problem of job losses. While economists were not expecting to repeat April's figure and were aiming for 170,000 jobs in May, the figure of 54,000 came as a shock to all, sending stocks plunging, and causing economists to make major adjustments in their growth projections.

• Moral Hazard – Part 1 - 27 December 2010

Renowned in financial circles for his work on incentives relating to asymmetric information, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Bengt Robert Holmström defines the term 'moral hazard' in the 1979 Bell Journal of Economics as follows: "It has long been recognized that a problem of moral hazard may arise when individuals engage in risk sharing under conditions such that their privately taken actions affect the probability distribution of the outcome." Economist Professor Paul Krugman put it in a nutshell by describing moral hazard as being "any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly."

• Third Quarter Results and QE2 Under Spotlight on Wall Street - 18 October 2010

With seven Dow blue-chip stocks due to release 2010 third-quarter result during this week, investors may have their attention temporarily diverted from the implications of the 'quantitative easing' proposed by the Federal Reserve as a means to boost the economy. The seven blue-chip Dow components are Bank of America, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Caterpillar, American Express, McDonalds and Verizon. Other major companies in the banking sector releasing third-quarter results in the upcoming week include Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo, while the tech sector releases include Apple and Yahoo. While analysts acknowledge that it's too early in the third-quarter earnings season to make any judgments, thus far of the results posed, 83 percent have beaten estimates by analysts – an observation that adds an element of optimism for the week ahead.

• The Perils of High-Speed Trading - 17 may 2010

While talk of a stock exchange generally brings to mind the vibrant organized chaos of dealers on the floor shouting buy and sell instructions - scoring spectacularly, or failing dismally, wiping out fortunes in a heart-beat - the reality of modern-day stock market trading is quite different. The majority of today's trading is carried out by state of the art technology, often being referred to as high-frequency trading, or high-speed trading – an apt description by any measure. On Thursday May 6, the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced an intraday drop of close to 1,000 points, and although stock market regulators have not yet pinpointed the cause of the dramatic drop, it has been conceded that high-speed trading is likely to have contributed to the incident, but was unlikely to have been the sole cause. Critics of the constantly evolving manner of modern trade, however, point to this incident as being evidence of the risks linked to high-speed trading.