The mystery of a ‘lost’ UBS subsidiary 29/04/2013 Established in 1991 by James Doyne Farmer, a former head of the Complex Systems group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Norman Packard, a former physics academic, Santa Fe, the New Mexico-based The Prediction Company, specialises in building black-box trading systems for a variety of financial markets. These incorporated the skills and experience of its founders, together with other employees, most of whom also had backgrounds in complex systems and chaos, to identify “meaning” or predictable patterns from what appeared to be random noise. These could be used as the basis for creating algorithm-based market trading systems.
Why a lot of wealth management ‘research’ is not worth the paper it is printed on 26/04/2013 The mainstream media has had a lot of fun in recent days at the expense of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard University economics professors, the authors of “This Time Its Different”, a seminal study of the impact of debt on economic growth published in 2009.
After Cyprus debacle, offshore Russians 'can turn to Luxembourg' 25/04/2013 Prospects are clouded for Cyprus as a domicile for investment and transaction structures set up by entrepreneurs and investors from Russia and other eastern European countries such as Ukraine following a levy on bank deposits and capital controls.
Barclays’ wealth management oversight 25/04/2013 Back in 2006 thewealthnet opined that Barclays remained a relative underachiever within both the UK and the global private banking and wealth management sectors given the capabilities it then possessed and a big latent customer base (see thewealthnet 11/01/2006). Seven years on the situation has changed significantly.
A closer look at HSBC’s restructuring proposals for its UK wealth management business 24/04/2013 The treatment and status of private banking and wealth management services within big universal banking groups often comes across as something similar to Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Examine the annual reports and accounts of some of the biggest banks in the world and one will sometimes be hard pushed to find any reference to, much less data about, private banking and wealth management. Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are just three institutions that come to mind in this respect.
HSBC is not so culpable in this respect.
The real impact of QE and loose monetary policies on equity and bond returns 23/04/2013 It is widely acknowledged that the extremely loose monetary policies initiated by central banks around the world over the past five years have distorted the prices of financial assets by a considerable margin.
But would happen to bond and equity returns if monetary conditions “normalised”? According to Veritas, a London-based private client investment management firm, the effects would be significant, not least because bonds are currently overvalued.
Where brushing up on your ‘complaint hygiene’ can reduce the need to FOS 23/04/2013 In November last year, the Financial Ombudsman Service announced that it had increased its staff numbers by 25 per cent over the last year under the weight of payment protection insurance miss-selling - with plans to keep hiring if complaints continue at current levels. The cost of such referrals to a financial firm is significant, but effective ‘complaint hygiene’ can eliminate much of the pain, writes Chris Kaye, CEO of co-comply.
The true ‘worth’ of the 2013 Sunday Times Rich List 22/04/2013 The commentary accompanying The Sunday Times’ 2013 Rich List published on 21 April assumed a more celebratory tone than usual. Not only did the wealth of its constituents once again increase at a healthy lick. This year marks the 25th time that The Sunday Times has published an annual Rich List. But does the Rich List serve any useful purpose or contain anything of relevance for students of wealth and the UK’s wealth management sector?
Barclays Wealth and Investment Management: What next after Tom Kalaris? 19/04/2013 Barclays Wealth and Investment Management (WIM) may have appeared relatively unaffected by the strategic review initiated by Antony Jenkins in the wake of his appointment to succeed Robert Diamond as chief executive of Barclays, one of the UK’s biggest banking and financial services group.
