SNL IR Solutions' 2015 Investor Survey

SNL IR Solutions recently ran its annual survey of the investment community on a range of topics for Investor Relations websites. Based on almost 600 responses from across the industry, the report highlights what investment professionals consider most important when visiting IR websites.  The findings, presented in a pictorial, cover key areas ranging from content mobile friendliness and social media

The China Syndrome: Lessons from the A-Shares Bubble

The Chinese stock market rallied more than 150% as the Shanghai Composite Index rose from 2,037 at the end of June 2014 to its peak of 5,166 in June 2015. Many market commentators, most notably Bill Gross, called it a “stock market bubble” and predicted a collapse. However, it bears asking, “What is a stock market bubble and how is it different from just a run-of-the-mill bull market?”

Simply stated, a bubble is an irrational bull market, where prices for stocks have run up much more than can be justified by improvements in the underlying corporate fundamentals. Classic stock market bubbles were the Japanese bubble during the late 1980s and the U.S. tech bubble that occurred in the 1990s. A characteristic attribute of a bubble is an unjustifiably high price-to-earnings multiple (P/E) for the market. 

Bitcoin: A Primer – Investigating Bitcoin

Few innovations have generated as much controversy and potential for worldwide economic transformation as have Bitcoin and bitcoin. Bitcoin is an open source, decentralized technology platform upon which bitcoin, the digital currency, depends. On August 1, 20151, the digital currency was priced at $280 per bitcoin, with 14.5 million units in circulation, $4 billion in stored value, and a nearly 90% share of global digital currency market capitalization (market cap).

Bitcoin was birthed in the ferment of the 2008 financial crisis by Satoshi Nakamoto, a person or organization that to this day is anonymous. The antithesis of a centralized banking system, Bitcoin is decentralized and does not require a central repository or single administrator to process transactions. Instead, it relies on the cryptographic security of mathematics and the computational power of distributed computers to create a digital ledger that is transparent to the world.

Jeremy Siegel on Stocks: This Is a Correction, Not a Bear Market

Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel says the drop in U.S. stock markets that began last Friday is a temporary correction, largely in response to events in China and unusually large, downward revisions in U.S. corporate earnings expectations. But while the correction so far has hovered around 10%, he warns that such downward movement often generates a rebound, which is already is underway, followed by a further drop. In this Knowledge@Wharton interview, Siegel says he thinks the Dow ultimately could drop 15% from recent highs before recovering to around 19,000 by year-end. What’s happening now is a correction — not the beginning of a bear market — which would be a drop of around 20% or more, he notes.