Investors and technology watchers are trying to figure out whether Nokia (NOK) has markedly improved, or furthered damaged, its position in the cutthroat mobile communications business. But it's the company's internal communications that Peter Drucker would have wondered most about.
To many people, China is the Japan of the 1980s, a hurtling, unstoppable economic goliath.
Whether China will fulfill this destiny or, like Japan, will be tripped up by internal failings remains to be seen, but China will undeniably be a deal-making force for years. Two recently announced acquisitions show the shape of Chinese deal-making and how the United States may react.
Financial literacy has become a huge catchphrase -- the one idea upon which consumer advocates and bankers, borrowers and lenders, even Republicans and Democrats all agree.
Everyone supports the notion that we need more financial literacy. Myriad organizations are putting money behind creating finance management classes and even mandating them on a state-by-state basis.
Hedge funds chalked up their strongest gains in 16 months in September, helped by climbing stock prices around the world, Reuters said, citing data from Singapore-based fund tracker Eurekahedge.
Eurekahedge said its hedge fund index was up 3.45 percent month-on-month for September, raising returns since the start of the year to 5.15 percent.
The Mexican stock market is going gangbusters this year despite a drug war that has claimed more than 28,000 lives.
The Mexican stock market's IPC Index has increased 6.7% year-to-date, outpacing the Dow Jones industrial average's 5% gain.
This is one of the factors that prompted John Lomax, emerging markets equity analyst for HSBC in London, to upgrade Mexico to an "overweight" rating, in other words: "buy."
European financial institutions, traditionally the dominant owners of money management businesses on the Continent, also are at the heart of current M&A activity, according to bankers and analysts.
In another sign that the outlook for deals is improving, the dollar volume of takeovers in Europe rose 19% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $205.5 billion, according to research firm Dealogic. Bankers expressed confidence that a three-year drought in deal making is finally coming to an end. Underpinning the optimism is a belief that the sovereign-debt concerns that rattled markets earlier in the year have become less threatening.
Chinese initial public offerings are back with a vengeance in the U.S. market, and are vastly outperforming those by American and European companies.
Chinese companies have posted returns of around 30 percent compared with about 4 percent for other U.S.-debuting IPOs, according to data from Greenwich, Connecticut-based IPO research house Renaissance Capital.
Even some of the savviest hedge fund managers got burned in 2008 by sticking with their hot stocks for too long as the market tumbled, Reuters writes.
Now, with fresh signs of weakness in the United States economy, they are positioning to avoid making the same mistakes.
The shift, evident in second-quarter securities filings, is not as simple as leaving equities behind, as many small investors have been doing recently.
E Fund Management Co., China's second-largest asset management company, plans to start the nation's first officially registered hedge fund after the securities regulator eased rules in July.
E Fund will be able to raise money from high-net-worth individuals in separate managed accounts and use the same investment strategies as hedge funds in what the money manager with about 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in assets says will be the first institutional hedge-fund product in China.