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BCA Research
BCA Research Inc. is an independent provider of global investment research and investment strategy advice. BCA was founded by A. Hamilton Bolton in 1949 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The firm is also known by the title of its first publication The Bank Credit Analyst. BCA Research provides economic analysis and trend forecasts of the major financial asset classes and geographic markets. These include equities, foreign exchange, fixed income and commodities & energy. The geographical coverage includes the US, Emerging Markets, Europe, China and Global strategies. BCA delivers the research through weekly bulletins, daily insights, special reports, proprietary market studies, chart packs and conferences. BCA Research clients include portfolio managers, hedge funds, asset management firms, pension funds and endowments, central banks, security dealers, sovereign wealth funds, private banking, insurance companies, private equity firms, family offices and individual investors. BCA Rese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Privately Held Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned, traded, exchanged privately, or Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter. In the case of a closed corporation, there are a relatively small number of shareholders or company members. Related terms are closely-held corporation, unquoted company, and unlisted company. Though less visible than their public company, publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for ($1.8 trillion) in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodities
In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory. Popular commodities include crude oil, corn, and gold. Other definitions of commodity include something useful or valued and an alternative term for an economic good or service avail ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Insurance Companies
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent or uncertain loss. An entity which provides insurance is known as an insurer, insurance company, insurance carrier, or underwriter. A person or entity who buys insurance is known as a policyholder, while a person or entity covered under the policy is called an insured. The insurance transaction involves the policyholder assuming a guaranteed, known, and relatively small loss in the form of a payment to the insurer (a premium) in exchange for the insurer's promise to compensate the insured in the event of a covered loss. The loss may or may not be financial, but it must be reducible to financial terms. Furthermore, it usually involves something in which the insured has an insurable interest established by o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Private Banking
Private banking is banking, investment and other financial services provided by banks and financial institutions primarily serving high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs)—defined as those with very high levels of income or sizable assets. A bank that specializes in private banking is called a private bank. Private banking is a more exclusive subset of wealth management, geared toward exceptionally affluent clients. The term "private" refers to customer service rendered on a more personal basis than in mass-market retail banking, usually provided via dedicated bank advisers. At least until recently, it largely consisted of banking services (deposit taking and payments), discretionary asset management, brokerage, limited tax advisory services and some basic concierge-type services, offered by a single designated relationship manager. History Private banking is how banking originated. The first banks in Venice were focused on managing personal finance for wealthy families. Private ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sovereign Wealth Funds
A sovereign wealth fund (SWF), sovereign investment fund, or social wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity fund or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by revenues from commodity exports or from foreign-exchange reserves held by the central bank. Some sovereign wealth funds may be held by a central bank, which accumulates the funds in the course of its management of a nation's banking system; this type of fund is usually of major economic and fiscal importance. Other sovereign wealth funds are simply the state savings that are invested by various entities for the purposes of investment return, and that may not have a significant role in fiscal management. The accumulated funds may have their origin in, or may represent, foreign currency deposits, gold, special drawing rights (SDRs) and In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Central Banks
A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages the currency and monetary policy of a country or monetary union, and oversees their commercial banking system. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary base. Most central banks also have supervisory and regulatory powers to ensure the stability of member institutions, to prevent bank runs, and to discourage reckless or fraudulent behavior by member banks. Central banks in most developed nations are institutionally independent from political interference. Still, limited control by the executive and legislative bodies exists. Activities of central banks Functions of a central bank usually include: * Monetary policy: by setting the official interest rate and controlling the money supply; *Financial stability: acting as a government's banker and as the bankers' bank ("lender of last resort"); * Reserve management: managing a country's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Endowment
A financial endowment is a legal structure for managing, and in many cases indefinitely perpetuating, a pool of financial, real estate, or other investments for a specific purpose according to the will of its founders and donors. Endowments are often structured so that the inflation-adjusted principal or "corpus" value is kept intact, while a portion of the fund can be (and in some cases must be) spent each year, utilizing a prudent spending policy. Endowments are often governed and managed either as a nonprofit corporation, a charitable foundation, or a private foundation that, while serving a good cause, might not qualify as a public charity. In some jurisdictions, it is common for endowed funds to be established as a trust independent of the organizations and the causes the endowment is meant to serve. Institutions that commonly manage endowments include academic institutions (e.g., colleges, universities, and private schools); cultural institutions (e.g., museums, librarie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pension Funds
A pension fund, also known as a superannuation fund in some countries, is any plan, fund, or scheme which provides retirement income. Pension funds typically have large amounts of money to invest and are the major investors in listed and private companies. They are especially important to the stock market where large institutional investors dominate. The largest 300 pension funds collectively hold about USD$6 trillion in assets. In 2012, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that pension funds worldwide hold over $33.9 trillion in assets (and were expected to grow to more than $56 trillion by 2020), the largest for any category of institutional investor An institutional investor is an entity which pools money to purchase securities, real property, and other investment assets or originate loans. Institutional investors include commercial banks, central banks, credit unions, government-linked co ... ahead of mutual funds, insurance companies, currency reserves, sovereign wealth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asset Management
Asset management is a systematic approach to the governance and realization of value from the things that a group or entity is responsible for, over their whole life cycles. It may apply both to tangible assets (physical objects such as buildings or equipment) and to intangible assets (such as human capital, intellectual property, goodwill or financial assets). Asset management is a systematic process of developing, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets in the most cost-effective manner (including all costs, risks, and performance attributes). The term is commonly used in the financial sector to describe people and companies who manage investments on behalf of others. Those include, for example, investment managers that manage the assets of a pension fund. It is also increasingly used in both the business world and public infrastructure sectors to ensure a coordinated approach to the optimization of costs, risks, service/performance, and sustainability. IS ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hedge Funds
A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that trades in relatively liquid assets and is able to make extensive use of more complex trading, portfolio-construction, and risk management techniques in an attempt to improve performance, such as short selling, leverage, and derivatives. Financial regulators generally restrict hedge fund marketing to institutional investors, high net worth individuals, and accredited investors. Hedge funds are considered alternative investments. Their ability to use leverage and more complex investment techniques distinguishes them from regulated investment funds available to the retail market, commonly known as mutual funds and ETFs. They are also considered distinct from private equity funds and other similar closed-end funds as hedge funds generally invest in relatively liquid assets and are usually open-ended. This means they typically allow investors to invest and withdraw capital periodically based on the fund's net asset value, whereas privat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Portfolio Managers
A portfolio manager (PM) is a professional responsible for making investment decisions and carrying out investment activities on behalf of vested individuals or institutions. Clients invest their money into the PM's investment policy for future growth, such as a retirement fund, endowment fund, or education fund. PMs work with a team of analysts and researchers and are responsible for establishing an investment strategy, selecting appropriate investments, and allocating each investment properly towards an investment fund or asset management vehicle. Model In the 1950s, Harry Markowitz, an American economist, developed the modern portfolio theory. Jack Treynor (1961, 1962), William F. Sharpe (1964), John Lintner (1965) and Jan Mossin (1966) later build the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) on the theory of Markowitz. Nowadays, the CAPM is one of the primary portfolio management tools. The formula calculates the potential return percentage of an investment vehicle based on its veste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
