Saturday, 16 July 2016

Worldwide IT Spending Forecast Flat for 2016 - Gartner

Traditional outsourcing growth is being put on the back foot by customizable Internet-based software. This is impacting the profits of "traditional" IT outsourcing businesses like Infosys. Operating margins for both TCS and Infosys is around 25%.

Sunday, 3 July 2016

Low Oil Prices Lead to Wealth Fund Consolidation

IPIC (International Petroleum Investment Company), formed in 1984, is planning to merge with Mubadala Development Company PJSC (Private Joint Stock Company), according to the Emirates news agency (WAM).

Thursday, 30 June 2016

GAM buys $4bn AuM Cantab Capital Partners for $290m and starts Systematic Unit

Zurich-based GAM (listed on the Swiss stock exchange and which manages around $120 billion) is acquiring Cantab Capital Partners (CCP), a systematic asset management firm.

This acquisition will form the basis of GAM Systematic - a new offering from GAM covering "traditional" long-only investments as well as alternative investing.

In GAM's investor presentation, a Deutsche Bank 2016 Alternative Investment survey was referenced which mentioned a growing allocation to systematic strategies by institutional investors (the presentation also heralds equity market neutral strategies as offering promising performance in 2016). Coupled with GAM's distribution network, there is certainly scope for GAM to ramp up allocations to its systematic funds.

GAM is also planning UCITS versions of CCP's strategies, UCITS being a form of European-regulated fund first introduced in 1985

The question though is whether performance can be maintained and what capacity constraints exist on the strategies pursued by the funds - according to GAM, the funds are scalable and the capacity constraints are low. This is supported by the proportion of Cantab's employees who are involved in strategy research (high), multiple models and multiple traded markets. Cantab has $4bn AuM as of 31 May 2015.

ONS Publishes Q1 2016 CAD Figures for the UK

The ONS has published its Q1 CAD figure of £32.6 billion (3x2=6). This means value of imports exceeds the value of exports.

George Osborne, the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer since 2010, expressed an interest in managing the economy to surplus, but has since retracted this aim post Brexit (the "Exchequer" was the medieval English institution responsible for collection of revenues, whose name comes from a physical table used to perform tax calculations).

Thursday, 2 June 2016

From Soda to Soya - Coca Cola Makes Unconventional Acquisition from Unilever

Coca Cola is acquiring AdeS, the biggest brand in soy beverage in Latin America for $575m.

Tuesday, 31 May 2016

Oil Companies Adapt to "Lower for Longer" Operating Environment

With oil prices hovering around $50 a barrel, oil companies are adapting to a "lower for longer" oil price environment.  This has meant cutting back on investment and jobs. Shell plans to shut down its office in the Thames Valley Park by the end of 2016.

Wednesday, 4 May 2016

AWS Lifts Amazon Q1 Earnings - Cloud Computing Proves Viable Second Stream To Ecommerce

For the last 12 months, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a $9bn business. Bezos expects it to be a $10bn annual business.

Within the AWS offering, Amazon offers EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Customers include Netflix, Autodesk and Nasa/JPL. EC2 works in conjunction with VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) - which allows users to create their own virtual networking environment within AWS, including IP address ranges, subnets and so forth.