Governor Jack Markell today announced a groundbreaking initiative by the State of Delaware to embrace the emerging blockchain and smart contract technology industry, which can help the public and enterprises lower their transactional costs, speed up and automate manual processes, and reduce fraud.
read more...Governor Markell Launches Delaware Blockchain Initiative - Reflects Stateâs Commitment To Innovation And Embracing The New Economy
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THE STARTUP CHECKLIST 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business
 |  | David S. Rose's book THE STARTUP CHECKLIST: 25 Steps to Scalable, High-Growth Business applies the dual perspective of an angel investor and serial entrepreneur to give entrepreneurs the truth about the crucial dos and don’ts they need to take to get a business started and to attract capital. |
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Five Dimensions of Employee Engagement
The Sloan Management Review published a piece recently about the connection between employee engagement and profitability growth. V. Kumar and Anita Pansari conducted research on employee engagement in a wide range of companies. They first set out to define engagement, given that many people look at the concept differently. They settled on a definition that encompassed five dimensions of engagement:
We wanted to use our discussions with managers and a review of the literature to understand how employee attitudes and behaviors affected company performance. This led us to define employee engagement as âa multidimensional construct that comprises all of the different facets of the attitudes and behaviors of employees towards the organization.â7 The five dimensions of employee engagement are: employee satisfaction, employee identification, employee commitment, employee loyalty and employee performance.
After controlling for other relevant factors including GDP level, marketing costs, the nature of the business and the type of goods, we found that the highest level of growth in profits (10% to 15%) occurred in the group of companies whose employees were highly engaged; the lowest level of growth in profits (0% to 1%) occurred in the group of companies whose employees were disengaged.
We wanted to use our discussions with managers and a review of the literature to understand how employee attitudes and behaviors affected company performance. This led us to define employee engagement as âa multidimensional construct that comprises all of the different facets of the attitudes and behaviors of employees towards the organization.â7 The five dimensions of employee engagement are: employee satisfaction, employee identification, employee commitment, employee loyalty and employee performance.
The scholars used their "employee engagement scorecard" to measure engagement in 75 companies in 7 different countries. One year later, they examined profitability growth at 30 of those firms in depth. Here's their conclusion:
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Funny Take on Interview Mistakes!
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Turnover At Deutsche Börseâs Cash Markets At 110.2 Billion Euros In April
Order book turnover on Xetra, Börse Frankfurt and Tradegate Exchange across all asset classes stood at €110.2 billion in April (April 2015: €137.1 billion).
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SEC: Silicon Valley Executive Settles Insider Trading Charges
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that a Silicon Valley executive has agreed to pay more than a half-million dollars to settle charges that he traded on inside information received from a board member at a Minnesota-based company that was trying to solicit a competing bid in advance of a merger.
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Weekly Announcements â May 2, 2016
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Attacks on the Press: Gender and Media Freedom Worldwide
 | | Attacks on the Press is the definitive guide to the state of press freedom around the globe, exposing abuses while exploring potential solutions. |
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Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions
 | | In this anticipated follow-up to Mergers and Acquisitions Integration Handbook, distinguished M&A expert Scott Whitaker delivers his popular brand of solid, actionable guidance to the complex process of cross-border M&A. |
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2016 Valuation Handbook: Guide to Cost of Capital
 | | 2016 Valuation Handbook - Guide to Cost of Capital provides the key annual valuation data previously published in the now discontinued Morningstar/Ibbotson SBBI Valuation Yearbook, and the Duff & Phelps Risk Premium Report. |
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Federal Reserve Board Announces Approval Of Joint Agency Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking To Implement Incentive Compensation Provisions Of Section 956 Of The Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act
The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced it has approved a joint agency notice of proposed rulemaking to implement the incentive compensation provisions of section 956 of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The vote was unanimous.
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CBOE Holdings Reports April 2016 Trading Volume
CBOE Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CBOE) reported today that April average daily volume (ADV) for options contracts traded on Chicago Board Options Exchange® (CBOE®) and C2 Options Exchange (C2), and futures contracts traded on CBOE Futures Exchange (CFE®) was 4.2 million contracts, a decrease of 4 percent from April 2015 and March 2016.
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Nasdaq Completes Acquisition Of Boardvantage
Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced the completion of its acquisition of Boardvantage, a leading board portal solution provider that also specializes in leadership collaboration and meeting productivity, powered by the MeetX platform.
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Thomson Reuters Announces Pricing Of US$500 Million Note Offering
Thomson Reuters (TSX / NYSE: TRI), the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced the pricing of its offering of US$500 million principal amount of 3.35% notes due 2026. The offering is expected to close on May 9, 2016, subject to customary closing conditions. Thomson Reuters plans to use the net proceeds of this offering to repay its US$500 million principal amount of 0.875% notes upon their maturity later this month.
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Why have asset price properties changed so little in 200 years. (arXiv:1605.00634v1 [q-fin.GN])
We first review empirical evidence that asset prices have had episodes of large fluctuations and been inefficient for at least 200 years. We briefly review recent theoretical results as well as the neurological basis of trend following and finally argue that these asset price properties can be attributed to two fundamental mechanisms that have not changed for many centuries: an innate preference for trend following and the collective tendency to exploit as much as possible detectable price arbitrage, which leads to destabilizing feedback loops.
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A unified pricing of variable annuity guarantees under the optimal stochastic control framework. (arXiv:1605.00339v1 [q-fin.PR])
In this paper, we review pricing of variable annuity living and death guarantees offered to retail investors in many countries. Investors purchase these products to take advantage of market growth and protect savings. We present pricing of these products via an optimal stochastic control framework, and review the existing numerical methods. For numerical valuation of these contracts, we develop a direct integration method based on Gauss-Hermite quadrature with a one-dimensional cubic spline for calculation of the expected contract value, and a bi-cubic spline interpolation for applying the jump conditions across the contract cashflow event times. This method is very efficient when compared to the partial differential equation methods if the transition density (or its moments) of the risky asset underlying the contract is known in closed form between the event times. We also present accurate numerical results for pricing of a Guaranteed Minimum Accumulation Benefit (GMAB) guarantee available on the market that can serve as a benchmark for practitioners and researchers developing pricing of variable annuity guarantees.
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Semi-analytic path integral solution of SABR and Heston equations: pricing Vanilla and Asian options. (arXiv:1605.00307v1 [q-fin.CP])
We discuss a semi-analytical method for solving SABR-type equations based on path integrals. In this approach, one set of variables is integrated analytically while the second set is integrated numerically via Monte-Carlo. This method, known in the literature as Conditional Monte-Carlo, leads to compact expressions functional on three correlated stochastic variables. The methodology is practical and efficient when solving Vanilla pricing in the SABR, Heston and Bates models with time depending parameters. Further, it can also be practically applied to pricing Asian options in the $\beta=0$ SABR model and to other $\beta=0$ type models.
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Density forecasting comparison of volatility models. (arXiv:1605.00230v1 [stat.AP])
We compare the predictive ability of several volatility models for a long series of weekly log-returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index from 1902 to 2016. Our focus is particularly on predicting one and multi-step ahead conditional and aggregated conditional densities. Our set of competing models includes: Well-known GARCH specifications, Markov switching GARCH, sempiparametric GARCH, Generalised Autoregressive Score (GAS), the plain stochastic volatility (SV) as well as its more flexible extensions such as SV with leverage, in-mean effects and Student-t distributed errors. We find that: (i) SV models generally outperform the GARCH specifications, (ii): The SV model with leverage effect provides very strong out-of-sample performance in terms of one and multi-steps ahead density prediction, (iii) Differences in terms of Value-at-Risk (VaR) predictions accuracy are less evident. Thus, our results have an important implication: the best performing model depends on the evaluation criterion
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Robustness of mathematical models and technical analysis strategies. (arXiv:1605.00173v1 [q-fin.PM])
The aim of this paper is to compare the performances of the optimal strategy under parameters mis-specification and of a technical analysis trading strategy. The setting we consider is that of a stochastic asset price model where the trend follows an unobservable Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. For both strategies, we provide the asymptotic expectation of the logarithmic return as a function of the model parameters. Finally, numerical examples find that an investment strategy using the cross moving averages rule is more robust than the optimal strategy under parameters mis-specification.
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Depreciation and the Time Value of Money. (arXiv:1605.00080v1 [q-fin.GN])
Generally accepted depreciation methods do not factor in the Time Value of Money, despite the concept being a core principle of financial asset valuation. By applying the concept to depreciation, Depreciable Asset Value Models can be formulated, that allow depreciation to be calculated in a manner consistent with financial theory. While the Basic Depreciable Asset Value Model formulated within has its limitations, more complex models, which factor in a greater number of variables, can be formulated using its logic.
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