Has Jack Ma made IPOs a weapon of corporate warfare? October 29, 2020 Ant Group is not a household name. An affiliate of Chinese tech wizard Jack Ma’s Alibaba, it operates the digital payment platform Alipay, which serves more than a billion users and is China’s largest such enterprise. This week, Ant Group announced the pricing of its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Shanghai’s Star [...]
Institutions don’t share retail investors’ optimism on returns October 28, 2020 | City Talk Schroders’ studies suggest retail – or individual – investors are more optimistic about future returns than investors at large institutions. Individuals have indicated that they expect average annual returns of nearly 11% over the next five years while institutional investors anticipate a more moderate 6%. Schroders’ Institutional Investor Study is an analysis of views from [...]
Government issues sustainable finance standards for fund managers October 28, 2020 The UK has issued a set of standards for asset managers within the sustainable investment sector as it shores up its green credentials. Interest in environmental, social and governance-related investing has taken centre stage in recent years. Inflows into active ESG funds reached a record £392m in September, taking the quarterly total to £1bn, according [...]
Octopus Ventures ‘extremely optimistic’ about investment landscape October 28, 2020 Investors have spent most of this year looking inwards as they sought to shore up their portfolio companies in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. But even as the UK continues to grapple with uncertainty amid another round of lockdowns, some investors are starting to look for opportunities to expand their portfolio. London-based VC firm [...]
Octopus Ventures leads seed funding round in pet-tech firm Katkin October 28, 2020 London-based pet food company Katkin has secured £4.5m of funding in a seed round led by venture capital firm Octopus Ventures. Katkin was set up by siblings Brett and Nikki O’Farrell to produce healthy cat food after realising the options available didn’t provide cats with the nutrition they needed. The wet food contains 95 per [...]
Can behavioural finance explain how investors think about sustainability? October 27, 2020 | City Talk Schroders Global Investor Study 2020 examined the attitudes and beliefs of more than 23,000 investors on sustainability. It is a vast project that yields fascinating insights on the way investors think. We thought it would be interesting to put some questions to Stuart Podmore, Investment Propositions Director and an expert in behavioural finance, about the [...]
Why I’m calling for a £15bn National Renewal Fund to support growing businesses October 27, 2020 Some 90 years ago, a government committee set up to examine the health of the British economy identified a persistent shortfall in funding for small and medium-sized businesses. This shortfall was termed the Macmillan Gap — named not after the politician but after the Scottish lawyer, Hugh Macmillan, who chaired the committee. As the saying [...]
Three factors behind the rise of the retail trader in 2020 October 26, 2020 | City Talk 2020 has seen global financial markets such as equities and foreign exchange (FX) being moved by an army of retail traders, in a manner we have not seen previously. Their influence is here to stay, writes Brendan Callan. It’s a cliché frequently used to describe the events of this year, but 2020 has not been [...]
Barcelona’s strategy to attract foreign tech investment, second best in Europe October 26, 2020 | Sponsored The number of foreign tech companies in Catalonia grew by 21% in 2020 reaching 1,369 The fDi Intelligence division of the ‘Financial Times’ group together with The Next Web – one of the leading European media and companies in the field of technology and startups – recognise Barcelona and Catalonia’s strategy to attract foreign technological [...]
Could your savings save the planet? October 26, 2020 When Covid-19 upended our lives in March, Rishi Sunak became the hero of the hour by emptying the Treasury’s coffers to support the jobless and keep our economy afloat. It was the kind of quick-thinking fiscal response our country needed at a time of crisis — similar to the Treasury’s bank bailouts in 2008. But [...]