Space SPAC: Seraphim-backed satellite firm Spire makes New York debut August 18, 2021 Space investor Seraphim has announced its portfolio company Spire, which provides satellites for space, has debuted on the New York Stock Exchange after becoming the latest space company to close a merger via SPAC. Spire has merged with special acquisition company NavSight Holdings, which valued the satellite firm at $1.6bn in equity. The new combined [...]
Chasing Tesla: how traditional carmakers are revving up their electric vehicle production August 16, 2021 | City Talk Equities generally had a strong year in 2020, but few parts of the market could match the runaway share price gains of the pure electric vehicle (EV) makers. Tapping into investor (and day trader) demand for two popular themes – tech and sustainability – such companies became extremely highly sought after. US group Tesla is [...]
Podcast: The plastic problem facing investors August 11, 2021 | City Talk Read the full transcript Part one: The weight of plastic worth all the fish in the sea Ashleigh Cowie (AC): In doing research for this podcast I came across this astonishing fact. Are you ready for it? David Brett (DB): Go on then. Hit me with it. AC: Right now, there are more than 5 trillion pieces of [...]
Robinhood acquires investor relations platform Say Technologies in $140m takeover deal August 10, 2021 Fresh from its IPO at the end of last month, Robinhood today announced to its new shareholders that it will acquire online retail investor relations platform Say Technologies in a $140m (£101m) all-cash deal. New York fintech startup Say provides a digital platfrom that aims to enable retail investors to interact with the companies where [...]
Strategic asset allocation or how I learned to stop worrying and love dispersion August 10, 2021 | City Talk For decades, strategic asset allocation has been considered the driving force behind investment portfolio returns. But the old adage that allocation determines 90 per cent of performance is rapidly becoming outdated. During 2020 and 2021, we have seen how the world of investing is shifting from one in which declining interest rates drive beta performance [...]
Going public: This new report highlights six key trends driving the IPO surge August 10, 2021 | Sponsored While we’ve all been shut indoors for a year and a half, quite the opposite has been happening with the public markets. Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) grew 51 percent in 2020, and the trend is continuing into 2021, as worldwide exchanges continue to flash the new ticker symbols of recently minted publicly traded companies. Intralinks’ [...]
SoftBank to pause investment in China as tech crackdown withers shares August 10, 2021 SoftBank will take a “wait and see” approach and pause its investments in Chinese tech startups until Beijing’s current regulatory crackdown on the sector calms, chief executive Masayoshi Son said on Tuesday. Son hoped the situation will be resolved and new rules for the sector would be introduced within “a year or two”, but still [...]
Investors turn to overlooked data sources to assess firms’ ESG credentials August 8, 2021 A lack of publicly available information on companies’ ESG credentials is prompting investors to turn to overlooked sources to acquire data, new research shared exclusively with City A.M. reveals. Read more: Regulation and investors’ demands push fund managers towards ESG Figures from MBH Corporation shows 89 per cent of UK based professional investors think employee [...]
FCA approves James Hay’s Nucleus acquisition, creating £47bn mega-platform August 6, 2021 Pensions provider James Hay gained the nod of approval from the UK’s financial regulator for its £145m acquisition of investment platform Nucleus, in one of the biggest UK deals in years. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved Hay’s purchase of Nucleus on Friday, paving the way for their creation of a mammoth financial adviser platform [...]
Mitigating litigation risk: The impact of corporate social performance factors August 3, 2021 | City Talk Much has been written on the merits of ESG investing strategies and their ability to deliver comparable, if not superior, performance to traditional benchmarks. A majority of institutional investors are motivated to employ ESG investing strategies because they believe ESG will improve risk adjusted returns1, yet the circumstances in which ESG leads to better outcomes [...]