Funny or weird?

“Most innovations fail. And companies that don’t innovate die.” — Henry Chesbrough Innovation prevails during times of adversity. Organizations can treat the current coronavirus crisis as an existential threat or as an opportunity to help effectively navigate rough terrain now and in the future. Responsible innovation might just be a transformative solution. The traditional, shareholder-value […]

Aswath Damodaran had some advice for the audience at the 73rd CFA Institute Annual Virtual Conference: Don’t abandon valuation fundamentals during the COVID-19 crisis. “It is precisely times like these that they matter most,” he said. “You need to go back to the first principles of valuation. Everything I have learned about valuation has been in […]

Stronger women-in-leadership (WIL) metrics have well-documented benefits, yet companies have failed to truly accelerate their gender diversity efforts. Women make up 44.7% of S&P 500 employees and 36.9% of first- and mid-level managers, but as 2019 came to a close, they accounted for only 5.8% of S&P CEOs and only 21.2% of board seats, less […]

“In bear markets, stocks return to their rightful owners.” Benjamin Roth’s marvelous The Great Depression: A Diary contains the following entry from 11 December 1931, just several months short of the bottom of the worst bear market in US history: “A very conservative young married man with a large family to support tells me that […]

Margaret “Marg” Franklin, CFA, assumed her role as president and CEO of CFA Institute in late 2019, during what turned out to be the waning days of the longest bull market ever recorded. As that bull market gave way to a black swan in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, a new and volatile period […]

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.” — Howard Marks, CFA Oaktree Capital Management co-chair Howard Marks, CFA, sat down with Bloomberg senior editor John Authers at the 73rd CFA Institute Annual Virtual Conference and offered […]

NMC Health (“NMC”) was founded in Abu Dhabi in 1975 and expanded to become the United Arab Emirates (UAE)’s largest health care company. Listed on the FTSE 100, NMC operated in 19 countries and employed 2,000 doctors and nearly 20,000 additional staff. Then its fortunes took a turn. Signs of trouble emerged in December 2019. […]

As we move past what we hope is the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus of investors is shifting from the immediate economic damage to the way out of lockdown and on to a new normal. Since this is an unprecedented crisis, the forecasts of what the world will look like in the next […]

“The more leveraged takeovers and buyouts now, the more bankruptcies tomorrow.” — John Shad, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 1984 When the Reagan administration pushed for widespread deregulation in the early 1980s, financial services benefited enormously. The brisk innovation that followed sparked the junk bond and M&A mania that became known as […]