Word: investor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Some of these windfalls were the chimerical sums of weird accounting conventions. Citi, for example, booked $2.5 billion in gains - without which it would have booked a quarterly loss - because investor fears that it would go under decreased the market value of its liabilities. (Really, it's as perverse as that.) Loan losses are also still rising and could eventually swamp earnings again at many banks. But the first-quarter profits weren't entirely imaginary. As we look ahead, banks really are in a position to make money. "This is a great time to be in banking, you know," said...
...back down around 40 (see chart below). That's good news. The VIX is interpreted as a measure of volatility in a certain sense, but it more accurately measures fear rather than volatility. That is why the VIX is important to the average investor: it is a sign of uncertainty. So a falling VIX may portend better times ahead. (See pictures of the top 10 scared traders...
...price of an option, which gives an investor the right to buy or sell a stock at an agreed price, called the strike price, largely depends on the volatility of the underlying stock. If a stock is more volatile, and therefore more likely to move farther up or down, options are more valuable. For instance, as the market has fallen over the past year, investors have flooded into put options - the right to sell a stock - in order to hedge their portfolio against steep falls in the stock market. Thus, the prices of put options increased, and with them...
...While proposed solutions help fix conflicts of interest, more inevitably arise. A simple alternative would be to return to the “investor-paid” model that rating agencies followed pre-1968, when S&P began charging issuers for ratings, in addition to the subscription fee they had always collected from investors who used the ratings. Yet, as many firms argue—both in 1968 and in recent months, when the model has again been proposed as a viable solution—relying solely on a subscription service does not bring in enough revenue to allow rating...
...rebuke. According to The Wall Street Journal, many credit-rating agencies intend to use the constitutional right to free speech as a defense against upcoming litigation cases. While this may be juridical truth, and a clever defense, conflicts of interest and careless behavior will remain even under the old, investor-paid model. All the regulators can do is continue to effectively cooperate with rating agencies, working to create a better—albeit imperfect—system...