Online Guide to Investments and Insurance

A clear-cut empirical implication of the inventory model is that in setting their prices dealers take their inventory levels into account. More precisely, when their holding of a risky asset increases, they offer liquidity at better prices so as to induce their customers to buy. The opposite applies when their inventory decreases. There is a [...]

Most university and college libraries are also open to the public. You may, or may not, be allowed to check out books, but you certainly have the opportunity to look at their collection of books, magazines and journals and glean information from them while you are at the library. University libraries are often the repositories [...]

While there is a charge for a subscription to Inventors’ Digest Magazine, their website is completely free. You can find articles relevant to issues faced by the independent inventor, classified ads for services needed by independent inventors as well as a complete listing of tradeshows for all sectors of the market. For very reasonable fees, [...]

Investors experienced a classic example of this roller coaster during the 1999–2001 period. Growth and tech funds got hot and then abandoned. Value funds and energy funds were abandoned and then got hot. Fund managers were not hurt, though. Fund managers’ pay increased by 35 percent during the period. In the mid-1990s, financial sector funds [...]

Back-end loads may appear to be a good deal to you. Each year you hold the fund, the load goes down. After a year or two, the broker will recommend you switch funds. Many reasons can be given. You can avoid a taxable gain that will be distributed to you if you hold on. A [...]

The process of discovering who you are in relation to investments is different for everybody. We all start at different places based on our genetic makeup, our childhood, and our good or bad fortune, we move through different experiences in life, and arrive at different places. This book does not claim that this simple three-step [...]

If management flexibility, represented by real options, is the key to value creation, logic would seem to tell us that losing flexibility can destroy value. This section will illustrate this point. The first example occurs under command-and-control conditions. In a planned economy, a plant manager may be rewarded only for producing his quota, which he [...]

Modeling risk can be associated with the data quality as well as simple bugs in the calculation engine. The sector came of age at a time when the reporting requirements were minimal. Some servicers have voluntarily increased the volume of reported data. Best practices for disclosure in the sector include web-posted reports, detailed lease rollover [...]

Suppose we were to run a contest in which a group of 30 individuals were asked to predict the outcomes (heads or tails) on a series of coin flips. After each coin flip, some of the players would drop out because they made the wrong selection. If we continue the experiment until there is one [...]