One way to learn about trading (any sort of vanilla financial instrument), and of course, win some prizes, is to participate in virtual trading competitions. They may not be the most realistic of systems, particularly given that most allow you to trade as if each instrument had almost unlimited volume, but the fundamentals are still real enough to learn about.
(more…)

Just got an email from Milkround regarding how a “bad diet equals bad worker”. Nothing really new to anyone who has skipped breakfast and lunch a few times before.

£17 billion of lost productivity every year due to this seems a bit big, but heck, bad eating habits are certainly worth the overexaggeration to highlight in my book.

More interestingly, they say that only “…a total of 92 percent of employees have lunch…”, and one wonders how many of the remaining 8% are traders at financial institutions…

By now, anyone who even bothers with the financial markets would have read something about the subprime crisis. But it still remains interesting to track the development of the crisis to date.

Both Reuters and Wikipedia have done the hard work for us. I’ll just add a bit at the end on this month’s news.
(more…)

The corporate finance group is usually under the investment banking division umbrella. Often shortened to CorpFin, investment bankers in this group help companies with their capital investment decisions (longer-term decisions) and also working capital financing (shorter-term decisions). Refer to Merrill Lynch (Capital)’s CorpFin group web page for a real-life example.
(more…)

While this is an investment banking-related blog, it would be instructive to explain the concept of a commercial bank, if only to contrast what they do with what investment banks do. At the same time, universal/integrated banks like Citi and JPMorgan can really only be understood after you understand both their commercial and investment banking components.
(more…)