FedEx Saved From Bankruptcy With Blackjack Winnings - Business Insider

How I missed this for all these years is beyond me, but it fits my classes PERFECTLY!! When you have nothing to lose, you might as well take big risks!  See Galai and Masulis as well as very hail of Mary Pass ever,

FedEx Saved From Bankruptcy With Blackjack Winnings - Business Insider: "When FedEx's funds dwindled to just $5,000, Smith realized he didn't have enough to fuel the planes. The company had already gone to many extremes, from pilots using their personal credit cards to fuel planes to uncashed paychecks. So what's a desperate founder to do? Smith impulsively flew to Las Vegas and played blackjack with the last of the company money. Amazingly, when he came back the next week, he had turned the remaining $5,000 into $27,000 — just enough for the company to stay in operation for another week."

'via Blog this'

Hey, stock analyst: Your bias is showing - MarketWatch

Hey, stock analyst: Your bias is showing - MarketWatch:

"...earnings surprises of firms headed by female, foreign or Democratic CEOs are systematically upward biased, the researchers write in their paper. In other words, because analysts have underestimated the CEOs who don’t belong to their in-group, those CEOs’ companies more often surprise the market when earnings are reported, boosting share prices. “These results are also reflected in analysts’ buy and sell recommendations, with systematically more buy than sell recommendations for stocks of firms headed by CEOs belonging to their in-group,” says the paper, by Sima Jannati and Alok Kumar at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi at the University of Mannheim in Germany, and Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy."

'via Blog this'

Excessive executive pay for plain dumb luck: Barry Ritholtz - Moneyweb

great for class discussion from Barry Ritholtz:



Excessive executive pay for plain dumb luck: Barry Ritholtz - Moneyweb: "You can place much of the blame on compensation consultants and the corporate boards that hire them. Boards are supposed to act on behalf of shareholders when they are considering the pay packages created by the former. But the relationships are riddled with conflicts that produced the charade we have today.  That we are discussing packages and not mere salaries should give you the first inkling of how far around the bend the issue of compensating corporate executives has gone"



'via Blog this'

Endowment Sweepstakes: How Tiny Houghton College Beat Harvard - The New York Times

Endowment Sweepstakes: How Tiny Houghton College Beat Harvard - The New York Times:

"Compare the results with those of Houghton College, a liberal arts institution affiliated with the Wesleyan Church in the Genesee Valley in western New York. Houghton has just over a thousand students and an endowment of $46.4 million. Houghton emerged in the top quartile of all endowments, according to Nacubo, with a return of 11.85 percent for the year ended Sept. 30. (Houghton uses a different fiscal year.) For the calendar year, the results were also impressive, at 7.54 percent. Houghton has been able to lower its spending rate — the amount it withdraws each year to fund operations — to an enviable 4.5 percent, and may be able to lower it further, to 4 percent. How did tiny Houghton do it? The answer is pretty simple: Houghton got out of hedge funds and all alternative investments a year and a half ago, and moved the entire portfolio to a mix of low-cost index funds and mutual funds at the fund giant Vanguard."

'via Blog this'

An Ivy League professor who spent 4 months working in a South Bronx check-cashing store says we're getting it all wrong

An Ivy League professor who spent 4 months working in a South Bronx check-cashing store says we're getting it all wrong:

"The three common reasons customers cited for using a check casher over a bank: cost, transparency, and service.  Lisa Servon couldn't kick the nagging feeling that the financial elite had it all wrong. The prevailing wisdom from bankers and policy makers went like this: People who used alternative financial services — like check cashers and payday lenders — were making expensive and unwise decisions. If we could just educate the "unbanked" and "underbanked" and usher them into the modern financial system with a bank account, their fortunes would surely improve. But Servon, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania and former dean at the New School, had spent 20 years studying low-income communities, and that picture didn't add up. Most of the unbanked, the roughly 7% of US households without checking or savings accounts, and the underbanked, the nearly 20% that had such accounts but still used alternative financial services, that she encountered were neither naive nor irresponsible about money. "

'via Blog this'

ASU Professor Debunks Stock-Market Myth | KJZZ

ASU Professor Debunks Stock-Market Myth | KJZZ: "The so-called “Weekend Effect” refers to the tendency of stock returns to be significantly lower on Mondays than the preceding Fridays. Some theories point to companies releasing bad news after the markets close on Fridays, leading to lower prices on Monday, but new research reveals the “Weekend Effect” hasn’t existed for years.

"

'via Blog this'