Categories
Investing

Madoff made off with $65 billion

ON 29 June 2009, Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to defauding investors and was sentenced to 150 years in prison. The 71 year-old swindler is due to be released in 2159. Madoff’s $65 billion investment fraud has been referred to as a gigantic Ponzi scheme “dating at least as far back as the 1980s” (The Economist). […]

Categories
Strategy

Finding and retaining talent

THE ability to find and retain talented employees is vital to sustained business success. Attractive remuneration, stock options plans, medical benefits, and other incentives are attractive enticements for any employee. But what factors are important in attracting, focusing and retaining the most productive and talented workers? Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, in their international bestselling […]

Categories
Strategy

Business Mutualism

Business Mutualism MUTUALISM, a concept from biology, refers to a relationship between two species or organisms in which both benefit from the association. Following on from the ideas put forward in a recent talk by Robert Full, we can apply this idea to the world of business by considering the idea of “Business Mutualism”. We […]

Categories
Investing

Building flexibility into business planning

ONE of the take away lessons from the CFA curriculum is that the conventional method of valuing an investment is to determine the present value of expected future cashflows.  One way of doing this would be to use the constant growth dividend discount model, which estimates the value of a stock by assuming that dividends […]

Categories
Investing

CFA Level 1 Exam 2009 – post audit

An exam day overview I did the CFA Level 1 Exam yesterday. If you haven’t heard of the CFA Exam before, see the article “CFA Exam – What is it? Why do it? How to prepare.” It is definitely one of the most exhausting tests I have undertaken, a gruelling six hour 240 question multiple […]