New Year resolutions to aid your career January 7, 2010 GET TO KNOW YOURSELF BETTER Whether you’re looking to move to a role at another company or progress upwards in your current organisation, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your strengths. Do some self-assessment of your performance in 2009, identifying what went well in your job and in what areas you were less [...]
CAREERS CLINIC January 7, 2010 I’m a finance director of a large company, and I’m thinking of moving into interim management for a more flexible lifestyle. What advice can you give me? AS an interim manager, you’ll be parachuted into organisations to sort out particular difficulties. But you can’t just be a good problem solver – you need to be [...]
Stocks edge up but Fed urges caution January 6, 2010 THE DOW and S&P 500 inched higher, while the Nasdaq dipped yesterday after Federal Reserve officials said they were still worried about labour market weakness and a report on the services sector showed only slight improvement in the economy. Cautious minutes from the Fed’s last meeting, as well as the ISM services report, which showed [...]
No need to mistrust providers January 6, 2010 BEING a covered warrants issuer is a big undertaking. The calculation of the price and the dispatch of quotes is carried out by a complex, automated process, but there is also significant human intervention. Every day on the trading floor, our team of 30 market-makers works with a wide range of covered warrants, giving the [...]
Trades to suit all views and risk levels for the year ahead January 6, 2010 THE LAST couple of years have been a rollercoaster for investors, and while 2010 is not shaping up to be quite so unpredictable, there are certainly some bumps in the road ahead. It’s just the sort of environment where covered warrants come into their own. For one thing the most you can lose is your [...]
Outlook for sterling is getting even grimmer January 5, 2010 BAD noises have been rumbling around sterling for months now, but they got considerably uglier in the past days. The world’s biggest bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co (the cutely-acronymed Pimco), announced earlier this week that it is to cut its exposure to UK government bonds. This raises the spectre of other large investors losing [...]
IF YOU’VE LOST CONFIDENCE, GO FOR GOLD January 5, 2010 DIRECTOR OF CURRENCY RESEARCH, GFT PERHAPS the biggest irony of the past decade has been the fact that despite all the new financial products – ETFs, CDOs, CDSs and so on – the best return was earned by the oldest asset of all – gold. At the start of 2000, the yellow metal traded at [...]
Blizzards boost loonie, krone as oil and gas demand soars January 5, 2010 WHILE Londoners struggle to get into the work through the snow, clever forex traders are finding a way to profit from the grim weather. Whenever the winter is cold, the commodity markets get hotter as fuel demand rockets. Demand for natural gas in the United States was above its five-year average at the end of [...]
THE TIPSTER January 5, 2010 THE refusal by Iceland’s president to sign a bill to refund the UK some £2.3bn in savings lost in the Icesave collapse has the potential to heap further pressure on sterling. We’ve seen cable struggling to hold above the 1.6000 level in recent days and assuming there are no hints from the MPC later this [...]
Banks push FTSE higher but vaccine worries hit pharma January 5, 2010 THE leading share index ended 0.4 per cent higher on yesterday, hitting a fresh 16-month closing high, as banks and commodity stocks rose, but gains were capped by a fall in drugmakers on concerns over vaccine sales. The blue chip FTSE 100 closed 22.16 points higher at 5,522.50, its highest close since 2 September 2008 [...]