Aggressive Investment Research Articles

Development built on crony capitalism? The case of Dangote Cement

This paper critiques the emergence of Dangote Cement as the dominant player in cement manufacturing in Nigeria. It argues that the changed economic environment General Obasanjo met when he became president of Nigeria for a second time in 1999 made it difficult for him to continue the nationalisation policies and the expansion of government involvement in several spheres of economic activity that he helped to promote in the 1970s. The realisation that this strategy, which created numerous crony capitalists, was unsustainable resulted in Obasanjo allying with Dangote and promulgating the Backward Integration Programme (BIP) for the local cement industry. This made it possible for Dangote to risk aggressive investment in the capital-intensive cement production business. This strategy achieved public good by rapidly making Nigeria, an oil rent- and import-dependent economy with enormous limestone reserves, self-sufficient in cement production.

Designers project: Afrotouch Brands

Subject area Entrepreneurship, Analysis of business problems. Study level/applicability Masters in business administration, Entrepreneurship management. Case overview The CEO of Afrotouch Brands, Mr Emeka Emmanuel, must decide what level of investment his company would need to implement to increase its market share and revenue, thus ensuring adequate business competitiveness. Afrotouch Brands was among the leading names in gift items and indoor furniture in Nigeria. Despite the business main outlet in Victoria Island, the highbrow commercial centre in the city of Lagos, it has other high-profile outlets in Port-Harcourt and Abuja. From the very beginning, Afrotouch Brands attracted a lot of well discerning individuals who patronized the business based on the quality, the wide variety, the uniqueness and the lovely ambience of the showroom. The case describes the various investment alternatives needed for business expansion and discusses the probabilities of possible outcomes. Afrotouch Brands could maintain the medium scale indoor furniture they are currently doing, embark on a large aggressive investment to expand the indoor medium scale furniture to a large scale, maintain their business strategy in gift items and accessories or invest in outdoor furniture manufacturing. The challenge is to decide which of these alternative investment strategies the company should undertake in view of the associated levels of risk and uncertainty inherent in their implementation. Expected learning outcomes This case study teaches students the following: fundamentals of decision trees construction; calculating and understanding expected monetary values; assessing probabilities; determination of risk profiles for each decision alternative; display of risk profiles graphically; and identification of business alternatives. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Mitigating Effects of Gender Diverse Board in Companies with Aggressive Management

Prior literature posits that overconfident managers pursue aggressive investment and risk-taking strategies, and effective governance mechanism can help to restrain such behavior. We examine whether gender-diverse board helps to mitigate negative impacts of overconfident managers, and consequently improve firm performance. Specifically, we argue that women directors have different viewpoints and skill sets vis-a-vis their male counterparts – qualities that are necessary to achieve a more nuanced approach to corporate decision-making in an otherwise aggressive boardroom setting. Using data on 1500 S&P firms we find support for our main hypothesis. Further, we find that presence of only independent women director – neither gray nor insider – drives our result. Also, interestingly, we find that the positive effects of a gender-diverse board in companies headed by overconfident managers are limited to the only pre-SOX period and only limited to those firms that were SOX-non-compliant prior to the passage of SOX. Our results imply that implementing simpler governance-improving mechanism rather than imposing elaborate regulation may be in many cases equally effective in achieving desirable changes in management behavior.

Explaining the expense ratio of international equity funds

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of fund expense ratio for Malaysia-based international equity funds. An understanding of what these factors are and how they affect a fund’s expense ratio is important given that international funds can be expensive to operate and that fund expenses have negative impact on investors’ returns.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a standard cross-sectional regression model in examining the factors that influence fund expense ratio of international equity funds.FindingsThe findings show that sales charge is positively related to fund expense ratio although it is not included in the expense ratio computation. This suggests that investor could possibly incur additional “hidden cost” since sales charge represents an upfront cost that an investor has already paid at the time of the fund sale. Additionally, funds with aggressive investment objective and frequent portfolio turnover show higher expense ratios than funds with conservative investment objective and less trading activities. There is no evidence that fund size, fund age, and the number of funds in a fund family are significantly related to the fund expense ratio. While the lack of statistical finding for fund size in this study seems inconsistent with the results of the US market in general, the finding is supportive of the Thai equity fund market and thus implying that finding could be country specific.Research limitations/implicationsThere is limited availability of international equity funds in Malaysia.Practical implicationsThe findings provide useful insights for investors to make informed international fund selection decisions. Expense-conscious investors should pay particular attention to fund’s sales charge, turnover ratio, and its investment objective when selecting funds for investment.Originality/valueThis paper provides first evidence on the determinants of fund expense ratio of Malaysia-based international equity funds.

Corporate Governance and Corporate Performance Dispersion

This study, using a fixed effects model, empirically investigates the relationship between corporate governance and corporate performance dispersion. Suggesting a negative relationship, [1] theorize that when corporate governance improves there is a decrease in shareholder oversight which could permit greater managerial discretion to execute conservative investment policies leading to a decrease in corporate risk taking and hence a decrease in performance dispersion. For a positive link, [2], employing agency theory, contend that with poor corporate governance, managers may choose conservative investment policies for career preservation concerns, giving up value-enhancing risky projects. Our findings indicate that the Gompers and Bebchuk governance indices (institutional ownership) are negatively (positively) associated with the standard deviation of monthly stock returns. The results also indicate that better corporate governance is associated with higher as well as more variable capital expenditures and R&D spending. These findings are consistent with the argument that management of better governed firms behave optimally, follow more aggressive investment policies, leading to the increased dispersion of corporate performance.

Private placement and abnormal corporate payouts: evidence from large stock dividends

Dividends should be used as the way firms reward their investors, but in the Chinese stock market, large stock dividends have been criticised for several years. In this paper, through a case study and large-sample empirical tests, we find that large stock dividends are used to cater to investors participating in a firm’s private placement. Further empirical tests document that during the unlocking periods of privately issued new shares, firms are more likely to pay large stock dividends, especially when outside private placement investors are able to sell their shares. Additional tests reveal that private placement investors do make stock sales after receiving large stock dividends. Furthermore, firms undertaking large stock dividends after private placement have more frequent connected-party transactions, are more tunnelled by other receivables and have more aggressive earnings management and lower investment efficiencies, implying that the governance role of private placement is largely attenuated because of large stock dividends. Large stock dividends after private placement are also shown to be opportunistic behaviour and irrelevant to future performance in our study. Overall, the large stock dividends result in wealth transferring between insiders and ordinary investors, and further reduce the efficiency of resource allocation in the Chinese capital market. From the results we insist that regulators should encourage cash dividends and keep a close eye on potential abuse through large stock dividends.

Indian retailing perspective: challenges and opportunities

The market or the buyers are continuously changing the way they shop. Buying at the organized retail is an enjoyable experience for buyers. The shopping centers are becoming Family Entertainment centers. Some are enticing customers with taglines like “Shop, Eat and Celebrate”. Shopping centers with a number of cineplexes are now emerging which are called as “Hybrid centers”. Organized retailing in India accounts for less than two percent of the total retiling market. However with aggressive investments, organized retailing is set for expansion. The Indian government is also likely to spend USD 150 billion over the next few years to develop world class infrastructure, thereby, aiding growth in the retail sector. A common element of the expansion plans of different players appears to be the hypermarket. All leading Indian retail players are either already present or have plans for Hypermarkets. It will be foolhardy to adopt internationally successful retail formats to India conditions. One such factor could be the rural-urban difference. Hence, ITC is experimenting with a rural hypermarket through its Choupal Sagar format, which combines the grain procurement and storage centre with the mall. A key aspect of the model is to capture the farmer's visit to a mandi to sell his produce and offer a range of products and services to leverage the availability of cash with him/her post the sale.

Strategic IT investment in B2B e-commerce platform on user loyalty: considering variable investment cost

In the competitive market of B2B e-commerce platform, the early entrants have the advantage of switching cost while the late entrants have the advantage of declining information technology (IT) cost. Considering the variable investment cost due to the improvement of platform quality, the paper develops an IT investment model to investigate the best investment strategy for B2B e-commerce platform under the impact of switching cost, declining IT cost, price-sensitive coefficient and quality-sensitive coefficient. Results show that switching cost helps early entrants increase investment in platform quality, assume an aggressive investment strategy. Declining IT cost helps late entrants increase investment in platform quality and assume an aggressive investment strategy only when switching costs are lower. With the increase of price-sensitive coefficient, early entrants and late entrants should both decrease investment in platform quality. With the increase of quality-sensitive coefficient, early entrants and late entrants should both increase investment in platform quality.

Policies and deployment for Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles an assessment of the Normandy project

The paper provides a cost benefit analysis of one of the most prominent Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle deployment project in France, taking place in Normandy. The project builds on the substitution of a diesel Kangoo by an electric Kangoo ZE with a fuel cell range extender for public fleets. The sustainability of the scenario as it is envisioned today is questioned. A second scenario is explored. It builds on a more aggressive investment in infrastructure so as to generate a higher market share for FCEV, including long range vehicles and buses on top of light duty vehicles. It is shown that the resulting higher consumption of hydrogen would be a strong lever to reduce the cost of hydrogen refuelling stations as well as the transportation cost of hydrogen that would now be associated with on-site hydrogen production. This scenario may require a higher level in public funds at the early deployment phase but would deliver much better chances to achieve sustainability.

Changes in Markets Trends and Effectiveness of Equity Mutual Funds in Poland in the Years 2005–2014

After a sharp decline in the value of mutual funds’ assets in 2008 in subsequent years , their situation has improved. In 2014 it resulted in tripling their assets comparing to 2005. Using monthly data on 18 equity funds operating continuously in Poland in 2005–2014, the profitability, level of risk and efficiency of funds were examined. The results indicate that profitability and efficiency of funds are significantly correlated with the trends in prices on the WSE. Taking higher investment risk brings additional positive results especially during periods of upward trends in share prices. In periods of crisis, smaller losses are suffered by funds with less aggressive investment policy. In the long term, better efficiency is obtained by funds reaching relatively stable rates of return throughout the entire period and better adapting current investment policy to the current stage of economy.

성격유형이 인지·행동적 투자성향에 미치는 영향

본 논문의 목적은 MBTI를 이용한 투자자의 성격유형에 따른 인지적 행동적 투자성향을 알아보는 것이다. 총 400명의 설문 참여인원으로부터 MBTI, 인지적 투자성향, 행동적 투자성향 설문지를 수집하여 분석하였다. 분석결과 인지적 행동적 투자성향의 점수는 모두 I(Introversion, 내향형), N(Intuition, 직관형), T형(Thinking, 사고형)의 성격유형이 각각 E(Extroversion, 외향형), S(Sensing, 감각형), F형(Feeling, 감정형)보다 통계적으로 유의하게 안정성을 중시하는 투자성향을 보이고 있으며, J(Judging, 판단형)와 P형(Perceiving, 인식형)의 구분에서는 유의한 차이가 나타나지 않고 있다. 성격유형의 조합에 있어 ISF형이 가장 안정적인 투자성향을 보이고 있으며, 반대로 ENF형이 가장 공격적인 투자성향을 나타내고 있다. 또한, 인지적 투자성향의 점수와 행동적 투자성향의 점수의 상관관계가 0.86로 나타나고 있다. 본 연구결과는 투자회사 및 은행권에서 투자자의 성격유형에 따라 투자상품을 추천하는 기초 자료로 이용될 수 있을 것이다. The objective of this study is to investigate the association between MBTI personality types of potential investors and their cognitive behavioral investment disposition. Three questionnaires related with MBTI, cognitive investment disposition, and behavioral one from 400 subjects were collected and analyzed. Based on both cognitive and behavioral investment disposition scores, potential investors having E(Extroversion), S(Sensing), and F(Feeling) types tend to put up with the risk resulting from their investment better than ones who having I(Introversion), N(Intuition), and T(Thinking) types. However, the difference between J(Judging) and P(Perceiving) types was not significant. Also investor group with ENF combination had the most aggressive investment disposition among other groups. On the contrary the group with ISF had an tendency to avoid the investment risk. In addition the correlation between cognitive and behavioral investment dispositions was 0.86. This study is expected to be used as basic data with which investment companies and banks recommend adequate financial instruments to consumers.

Alpha-robust mean-variance reinsurance-investment strategy

Inspired by the α-maxmin expected utility, we propose a new class of mean-variance criterion, called α-maxmin mean-variance criterion, and apply it to the reinsurance-investment problem. Our model allows the insurer to have different levels of ambiguity aversion (rather than only consider the extremely ambiguity-averse attitude as in the literature). The insurer can purchase proportional reinsurance and also invest the surplus in a financial market consisting of a risk-free asset and a risky asset, whose dynamics is correlated with the insurance surplus. Closed-form equilibrium reinsurance-investment strategy is derived by solving the extended Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. Our results show that the equilibrium reinsurance strategy is always more conservative if the insurer is more ambiguity-averse. When the dependence between insurance and financial risks are weak, the equilibrium investment strategy is also more conservative if the insurer is more ambiguity-averse. However, in order to diversify the portfolio, a more ambiguity-averse insurer may adopt a more aggressive investment strategy if the insurance market is very ambiguous. For an ambiguity-neutral insurer, the investment strategy is identical to the non-robust investment strategy.

Investing in Obesity Treatment: Kaiser Permanente's Approach to Chronic Disease Management.

Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health care delivery system in the USA, takes a "whole systems" approach to the chronic disease of obesity that begins with efforts to prevent it by modifying the environment in communities and schools. Aggressive case-finding and substantial investment in intensive lifestyle modification programs target individuals at high risk of diabetes and other weight-related conditions. Kaiser Permanente regions are increasingly standardizing their approach when patients with obesity require treatment intensification using medically supervised diets, prescription medication to treat obesity, or weight loss surgery.

Traditional and Alternative Risk: Application to Hedge Fund Returns

This study compares the risk-adjusted performance of traditional and alternative investments. Instrumental to this design, we introduce a specific metric for assessing hedge fund performance, comprising both the relative advantage and the extra-risk of an alternative investment over a traditional one. We are concerned with the impact of the crisis. Common wisdom tells us that during phases of market euphoria, investors’ wishful thinking can make them overconfident of the high returns promised by the leveraged structures and the aggressive investment policies typical of this asset class; conversely, when the downturns hit, the “big bets”, taken by hedge fund managers, in risky and illiquid investments, can trigger severe losses in their investors’ portfolios. We found evidence that regime switches in stock returns emphasise the performance gap among the different fund investment policies; furthermore, some styles can effectively capitalise on managerial skill, outperforming traditional equity investment in terms of adjusted performance.

Factors of Efficiency of Open Investment Funds in 1997-2015

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionCollective investment funds are considered to be one of the most successful and effective financial innovations. They can be found in almost all economies of the world, where they play a role or powerful economic strength, or a small financial institution of marginal importance (Khorana et al., 2005). The differences in the meaning of these entities in the economies of individual countries are the result of the interaction of many factors, which by influencing the market of these institutions, inhibit or intensify its development.In the literature, a comprehensive taxonomy of factors affecting market development investment funds has not been developed, and mostly one focused on the related microeconomic, not macroeconomic issues.Factors affecting the development of the investment funds market can be divided into economic, including macro-economic and micro-economic ones, legislative, fiscal, and sociopsychological.The second and third of the above groups is the issue of our paper. This is due to the fact that generally macro and micro-economic factors are considered. A significant impact of tax and legal elements and socio-psychological ones on the effectiveness of the funds themselves is often neglected (although it might be considerable).1. Literature reviewIn the literature there are many publications, mostly international ones which are devoted to investment funds, and most importantly, their effectiveness. It seems that the most important works in this area are those written by J. L. Treynor (1965), W. F. Sharpe (1966), and M. C. Jensen (1968). Although the above mentioned authors conducted a detailed analysis of the US investment funds market, thus the results they received contributed to the development of research on the effectiveness of investment funds of global markets, including Europe. Also S. J. Kon and F. C. Jen (1979) worked over this subject. They conducted a study on a large group of 47 funds, taking into account the efficient market hypothesis. The research done by M. Grinblatt and S. Titman (1989) was conducted in a slightly different direction. Indeed, they showed that effectively managed funds were those whose managers had a very aggressive investment purposes.If, in turn, we consider our home market, the research on investment funds was carried out mainly by T. Miziolek (1997), E. Ostrowska (2003) and K. Perez (2012). The first of them conducted the study on the effectiveness of nine funds in 1997 focusing on the achieved rate of return, Sharpe's, Treynor's or even Jensen's measures. One of the main conclusions of his works was the lack of effectiveness of the surveyed funds. The works by E. Ostrowska concern the similar issue. However, her findings were a bit more optimistic with regard to the results of the national investment funds. K. Perez in his works runs a fairly deep analysis on the problems of the investment funds market both domestic and foreign ones and, most importantly devotes attention to the factors of development of that market sector.Considering the research strictly in the context of the analysis of the factors efficiency, one should primarily pay attention to the economic factors. In this regard, the research was already conducted by A. Demirguc-Kunt and R. Levine (2004), who studied the indicators of financial market development of forty-one countries. Similar research was done by D. Fernando, L. Klapper, Sulla and V. D. Vittas (Ferndando et al., 2003) who analyzed the activities of institutions of commone investment in the nineties of the twentieth century in the forty-developed and economically developing countries.Legal and tax regulations were analyzed by R. La Porta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer A. and R. W. Vishny (La Porta et al., 1998). They found that in countries with weaker investor protection, measured by the nature of regulation and the effectiveness of law enforcement, financial markets were smaller and had lower range. …

STRATEGY FOR BUSINESS PORTFOLIO DEVELOPMENT OF PT SEKAR LAUT, TBK.

PT Sekar Laut, Tbk. (PTSL), as a local company, has three main business units including snack crackers, cooking spices and private label. Due to the potentials of Indonesia, it is expected that PTSL can upscale its competitive advantage and has an ability to compete with global companies as well. The objectives of this research were 1) analyzing relative positioning of PTSL compared with market leaders in snack and cooking spices industries, 2) analyzing Life Cycle phase per business unit, 3) analyzing positioning of each product category in portfolio matrix, 4) formulating strategic recommendations to the management for each product category of PTSL. The method used in this study was descriptive analysis. The analysis tools used in this study were BCG matrix, Life Cycle model, IFE, IFI and GE matrix. The results showed that relative positioning of crackers and cooking spices business units in BCG matrix is in Question Marks quadrant. The results of Life Cycle model for snack crackers, cooking spices, and private label showed that they are in Growth phase. The result of portfolio analysis by GE matrix showed that shrimp cracker and fish cracker product categories are in Selective Growth quadrant. Vegetables cracker, cooking spices, uleg chili sauce, burger buns are in Investment and Growth quadrant. The strategic recommendation for shrimp and fish crackers is to identify the growth segment, aggressive investment and uphold position. The strategic recommendations for vegetable cracker, cooking spices, uleg chili sauce, and burger buns are growth, seeking for dominance and maximum investment. Keywords: portfolio analyzing, crackers, cooking spices, uleg chili sauce, burger buns

An adaptively managed dynamic portfolio selection model using a time-varying investment target according to the market forecast

In this paper, we propose an adaptive investment strategy (AIS) based on a dynamic portfolio selection model (DPSM) that uses a time-varying investment target according to the market forecast. The DPSM allows for flexible investments, setting relatively aggressive investment targets when market growth is expected and relatively conservative targets when the market is expected to be less attractive. The model further allows investments to be liquidated into risk-free assets when the market forecast is pessimistic. By dynamically determining the investment target, the DPSM allows construction of portfolios that are more responsive to market changes, while eliminating the possibility of the model becoming infeasible under certain market conditions. When the proposed DPSM is implemented in real-life investment scenarios using the AIS, the portfolio is rebalanced according to a predefined rebalancing cycle and the model’s input parameters are estimated on each rebalancing date using an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) estimator. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, a 7-year investment experiment was conducted using historical stock returns data from 10 different stock markets around the world. Performance was assessed and compared using diverse measures. Superior performance was achieved using the AIS proposed herein compared with various benchmark approaches for all performance measures. In addition, we identified a converse relationship between the average trading volume of a market and the value of the weighting parameter prescribed to the EWMA estimator, which maximizes cumulative returns in each market.

A Performance Measurement Framework of Cloud Storage Services

Recently cloud storage services emerged as essential services with the spread of mobile devices have been developing into sharing contents with numerous users around the world by combining with personal cloud. In addition, they have been evolving into overcoming the limitations of mobile devices and supporting a diversity of mobile devices. Cloud storage services involve enormous investment expenses, but they are expected to be more profitable, so aggressive investments of them are being made and their service quality is being improved. Nevertheless, the performance of cloud storage services is not easy to evaluate due to the diversity of storages and their complex operating environments and so on. It is difficult to compare performance measurement results objectively and quantitatively because each service provider applies its own configuration methods and performance evaluation standards. This paper proposes a performance measurement framework for cloud storage services, which could provide objective and quantitative performance measurement information, to select a suitable cloud storage service by comparing and evaluating them. The proposed framework could help to manage cloud storage performance effectively and it is expected to contribute to market activation by providing comparable cloud storage service performance information to both providers and users.

자녀에 대한 사교육과 체험활동 투자 패턴이 자녀의 학업성취 및 사회관계에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study was to explore the patterns of investment on children, analyze the differences in academic performance and social relations by the patterns of investment on children, and variables that influence academic performance and the social relations of children. To achieve such research objectives, the raw data from the 2012 Korean Child and Youth Panel investigation were used for the research. The analytical subjects of this research were the parents and the third-grade students of a middle school and the analytical methods used were: frequency, percentage, average, standard deviation, Chi-squared test, ANOVA, Duncan's Multiple Range test, K-mean cluster, and multiple regression analysis depending on the research purpose. The results of the research are as follows. Firstly, as a result formalizing investment pattern on children, there were five patterns of: experience oriented investment, passive experience investment, private education oriented investment, aggressive investment, and passive investment patterns. Secondly, for the patterns of investment on children, the level of academic performance was found to be the highest within the aggressive investment and the experience oriented investment types. The social relation level was found to be the highest with the experience oriented investment, with it being low in private education oriented investment and passive investment patterns. Thirdly, for the factors influencing the academic performance of the children, it was found to be higher in aggressive investment, private education oriented investment, experience oriented investment and passive experience investment compared to passive investment. Some sociological factors were also found to be influential such as mother's age, father's education, sex of children, school area of children, type of house, and income. For the social relation level of the children, the factors of the aggressive investment, passive experience investment, and the experience oriented investment as well as the sociological factors by sex of children and income level are influential.

Equilibrium analysis of one aggressive investment strategy

This paper presents an equilibrium analysis of one type of aggressive investment strategy that ensures a high return subject to accepting risk. We focus on the comparison between this aggressive strategy and a relatively conservative strategy — portfolio insurance. We demonstrate that the aggressive strategy enlarges investment opportunities, and that the market behaves more stable with the presence of aggressive investors than the market with conservative investors only.