Diversified Holdings Research Articles

О двойных (множественных) косвенных исках бенефициарных владельцев в интересах подконтрольных корпораций

The current stage of economic development requires transparency of asset ownership, which implies disclosure of all levels of corporate structures and final beneficiaries. This trend can be traced in tax, anti-sanction, and bankruptcy legislation. Disclosure of the corporate ownership structure is the main prerequisite for the realisation of the beneficial owner’s right to sue in the interests of a controlled corporation. A formal legal approach that denies such a right creates an imbalance between the interests of investors and the economy as a whole, strengthens the agency problem, which negatively affects the activities of diversified holdings. The circumstances testifying to the violation of the subjective rights of the beneficiary are the unfair actions of the prevailing beneficiary and the management controlled by him in the context of a corporate conflict. The choice between the recovery of the reflected losses in favour of the beneficiary (parent company) and the recovery of losses in favour of the controlled company at the claim of the beneficiary is the main debatable issue. The domestic legal order generally recognises the admissibility of protecting the interests of beneficiaries when making insignificant corporate decisions at the operational level of the holding and making unprofitable transactions by management in collusion with a counterparty.

The Effect of Reporting Opacity on Trading Opacity: New Evidence from American Depositary Receipt Trades in Dark Pools*

ABSTRACTTrading volume is increasingly shifting to dark venues, and the causes of this move are not well understood. We examine whether a firm's reporting opacity affects its dark pool trading and provide robust evidence that (partly) explains this volume migration. Exploiting the exogenous variation in home‐country reporting opacity in a sample of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and using multiple metrics for reporting opacity, we find that greater opacity associates with increased dark pool trading. This relation holds after controlling for firms' information environments, country‐specific governance issues, observable differences between ADRs and other securities that trade in dark pools (matched sample analysis), volume migration to dark pools during earnings announcements, informed trading in lit versus dark venues, ADR levels, IFRS reporting requirements, and the possible endogenous determination of home‐country reporting opacity and dark pool volume. The positive relation is stronger for ADRs held by (quasi‐indexing) institutions with low turnover and diversified holdings and weaker for ADRs favored by (transient) institutions that trade frequently and (dedicated) institutions that hold concentrated portfolios. Bid‐ask spreads are greater for higher opacity ADRs that trade in dark pools, indicating that reporting opacity is associated with the negative effect of dark pool trading on market quality. Our findings help inform the current debate on off‐exchange trading by showing how reporting regimes affect the trading venue choice.

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!

The Impact of Free Cash Flow on Profitability of Listed Diversified Holding Companies in the Colombo Stock Exchange

The purpose of this study is to identify the effect of free cash flow on the profitability of the Diversified Holding companies listed in the Colombo Stock Exchange. This study will facilitate individual and institutional investors with information to take appropriate decision, as this paper delivers whether the free cash flow actually influences profitability or not. The population consisted of nineteen (19) companies listed as Diversified Holdings on the CSE in June 2019. A Purposive sampling method was used to pick a sample of 17 companies listed at CSE (panel data). Secondary data was extracted from audited financial statements and annual reports of the firms, sourced from CSE for a period of five years (2014 –2019). Data analysis was done using a regression model since the nature of the data was quantitative. Free cash flows have a significant impact on the profitability of the listed diversified holdings companies in Sri Lanka. As per the given results through the analysis, it can be concluded that free cash flows, firm size and the Lag value of ROCE have a significant impact on the firm profitability.

Practical Applications of Diversification Benefits, Where Art Thou?

<h3>Practical Applications Summary</h3> In <b>Diversification Benefits, Where Art Thou?</b>, in the Winter 2019 edition of <b><i>The Journal of Wealth Management</i></b>, authors <b>Sam Pittman</b>, <b>Amneet Singh</b>, and <b>Sangeetha Srinivasan</b>, all of <b>Russell Investments</b>, consider how diversification may improve risk-adjusted returns (RARs) and what asset sectors may deliver those benefits. The authors examine whether exposure to some asset classes neutralizes the benefits from holding other asset classes, and how the returns from naive diversification match up to those from other approaches. Prompted by increasing investor skepticism over the advantages of diversification, the authors construct optimal fixed-weight portfolios with volatilities equal to those of three US-centric benchmark portfolios. They consider the historical benefits from diversifying into international equities, real assets, and below-investment-grade bonds. The authors draw from 15 different asset classes, to discern the regularity and magnitude of RAR improvement from diversification over five-year holding periods. They find that certain asset classes deliver diversification benefits more reliably than others; that some asset classes’ diversification benefits are dampened by the presence of other asset classes; and that portfolio returns from diversified holdings are subject to cyclicality that has longer wavelengths than the US business cycle. History implies the benefits of diversification will return, the authors note. <b>TOPICS:</b>Wealth management, retirement, portfolio construction

Exploring structures of product costing systems adopted by Sri Lankan listed companies: focusing on traditional vs. activity based costing systems

As the business environment has been changing continuously, it is critical to ensure that an appropriate MA system is adopted in organizations for intended purposes. The main objective of this study is to investigate patterns of adopting management accounting (MA) techniques by Sri Lankan listed companies for product costing purposes. This study applies Mixed Method Research approach. Accordingly, data were collected from 42 listed companies representing five industry sectors in Sri Lanka: Food Beverages &amp; Tobacco, Chemicals &amp; Pharmaceuticals, Diversified Holdings, Manufacturing, and Plantation, through interviews and discussions supplementary to the survey. The main tools of analysis for quantitative data were frequency tables, Pie charts, bar charts and Fisher’s exact tests using SPSS software, and thematic analysis and content analysis for descriptive data. The findings suggest that Traditional Costing (TC) systems are still popular among all selected industry sectors/companies except for Plantation sector who apply TC by 25% of companies, as they all apply ABC instead. Considering multiple costing systems, the most popular combination is the application of TC with an activity based costing (ABC) system, as complements or alternatives to one another. The study concludes that listed companies are satisfied with the MA techniques adopted for product costing as either single or multiple systems, regardless of whether they are traditional or modern techniques. Even though Sri Lankan listed companies are functioning with sufficient resources and well-equipped staff that require adoption of modern MA techniques i.e. ABC, most reveal that they still see no need to adopt such techniques because they are satisfied with existing systems and applications.

Analysing the Impact of Financial Ratios on a Company’s Financial Performance

This study was conducted to analyze the relationship between several chosen financial ratios and the financial performance of companies. Chosen financial indicators were Current Ratio, EPS, Firm size, Leverage Ratio and BV/MV Ratio. Financial performance of the companies was assessed through growth of the net profit margin. Ten companies which were registered in Colombo Stock Exchange which were categorized as diversified holdings were chosen as the sample. Financial data from 2013-2018 were considered for this study. A panel data analysis was used to determine the relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variables with given consideration to time series analysis and cross sectional analysis. According to the results of the study only current ratio, leverage and the firm size had significant relationships with the financial performance of the company. Current ratio and firm size positively impacted the company’s profitability, where as leverage impacted negatively. This study aims to enable informed decision making of the financial actors of an organization to enhance the profitability of the given organization.

Analysing the Impact of Financial Ratios on a Company’s Financial Performance

This study was conducted to analyze the relationship between several chosen financial ratios and the financial performance of companies. Chosen financial indicators were Current Ratio, EPS, Firm size, Leverage Ratio and BV/MV Ratio. Financial performance of the companies was assessed through growth of the net profit margin. Ten companies which were registered in Colombo Stock Exchange which were categorized as diversified holdings were chosen as the sample. Financial data from 2013-2018 were considered for this study. A panel data analysis was used to determine the relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variables with given consideration to time series analysis and cross sectional analysis. According to the results of the study only current ratio, leverage and the firm size had significant relationships with the financial performance of the company. Current ratio and firm size positively impacted the company’s profitability, where as leverage impacted negatively. This study aims to enable informed decision making of the financial actors of an organization to enhance the profitability of the given organization.

The Effect of Disclosure Opacity on Trading Opacity: New Evidence from ADR Trades in Dark Pools

As volume increasingly migrates away from exchanges to dark pools, we revisit the link between disclosure opacity and volume, conditional on the choice to trade in a dark venue. We exploit the exogenous variation in home-country reporting opacity to examine how disclosure opacity affects the fraction of ADR volume traded in dark pools. Using multiple metrics for reporting opacity and controlling for firms’ information environment and country-specific governance issues, we find that dark pool volume is positively correlated with home-country reporting opacity. This relation holds after controlling for observable differences between ADRs and other securities that trade in dark pools (matched sample analysis), volume migration to dark pools during earnings announcements, informed trading in lit versus dark venues, ADR levels, IFRS reporting requirements, and the possible endogenous determination of home-country reporting opacity and dark pool volume. The positive relation is stronger for ADRs held by institutions with low turnover and diversified holdings (quasi-indexers), and weaker for ADRs favored by institutions that trade frequently (transient) and institutions that hold concentrated portfolios (dedicated). Bid-ask spreads are greater for higher opacity ADRs that trade in dark pools, indicating that disclosure opacity magnifies the negative effect of dark pool trading on market quality.

Impact of Government Budget Announcement on Stock Market Sector Indices: Evidence from Colombo Stock Exchange

This study attempts to investigate the impact of Sri Lankan government budget announcements on five sector indexes of Colombo Stock Exchange, namely banks, finance & insurance; beverage, food & tobacco; manufacturing; motor; diversified holdings. The Event study methodology was used to analyze sector wise stock price behavior during the sample period of 2002 to 2013. Results revealed that although the overall trend of the average returns of each sector around budget announcements are same the magnitude of the reaction is different from sector to sector. Motor was the mostaffected sector and diversified holdings sector was the least affected.

Extent and characteristic of diversification among Hungarian agricultural holdings

Through the connection to rural resources agriculture has an impact on the three functions of countryside: ecology, society and economy. Resources of economy and production environment are continuously changing thus farmers have to adapt to these changing circumstances. One of the adaptation methods is the diversification of activities to promote effective capacity utilization and additional profit. However there is no standard definition of diversification from the point of agricultural economics aspect both traditional approaches and the influence of European Union should also be considered to define it. Diversification and alternative income opportunities could be subsistence possibilities for several farmers. This could be defined not only at private holdings’ but at enterprises’ level. According to a traditional approach Hungarian statistical databases collect on-farm and off-farm agricultural activities depending on the connection to resources of a farm business. Analysing this database an overall picture could be defined considering the position and characteristic of diversified farmers and the popularity of each activity among agricultural producers. Based on a study, published in 2011 (Hamza, 2011) this paper also involves the latest statistical data (2010, 2013). Analysing dataset of period 2000-2013 this paper gives an overall overview about national and regional position and characteristics of diversified holdings and activities.&#x0D; JEL code: Q19

Thinking Sex with Geopolitics

Thinking Sex with Geopolitics Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Whatever queer/sexuality may have (or have not) become, we all at least have reason to believe that it stridently refuses all gestures of conceptual, methodological, and temporal totalization. Or so one hopes. Readings of sexuality now emerge as necessarily provisional and open to transformation and to the velocities and inscriptions of other histories. It is this willingness to perceive sexuality as always somewhere else, as a force of disruption, even displacement, which has been the rallying call of all forms of queer/sexuality studies. Indeed, what studying sex (within and without queer studies) has taught us is that we are always inhabited by histories that exceed our capacity to capture them. Valerie Traub's magnum opus, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, in many ways exemplifies such a dictum; it is in equal parts a spirited homage to the inscrutability, wantonness, and sheer messiness of histories of sexuality and a sharp censure of the limitations, methodologies, and theories of scholars obscuring those histories. Fueling Traub's project is her embrace of sexuality's constitutive opacity. As she writes emphatically: [S]ex may be good to think with, not because it permits access, but because it doesn't (4). Traub turns primarily to the period (specifically Tudor and Stuart England) to explore the epistemological problem of sex where the opacities of eroticism (in all their forms) secure knowledge precisely in the ways in which they don't and can't be translated into digestible histories of the present.While there is much more to say about how the opacity of sex travels various routes within Traub's dizzyingly ambitious text, I want to gesture instead to its epistemic affinities with another conceptual category that is equally marked by its attachments to opacity: geopolitics. For both concep- tual categories-sex and geopolitics-the turn to and/or away from opacity orients habits of analysis that generate the value/capital that is implicit within both. Geopolitics, however, enters the diversified holdings of sexuality and queer studies (a term Traub uses to mark scholarship that is attentive to archives of the historical past) through languages of capitalization that shift the value of opacity into the labor of incommensurability. That is, geopolitical sites (particularly in the global South) continue to be read as obdurately and enticingly unresponsive-literally ungraspable forms. Indeed, the seductions of such unresponsiveness (often cast in the broad languages of divergent spatialities and temporalities) accrue a certain political value where you cede to geopolitical difference precisely to lay aside the epistemic work such difference does. Thus even as scholars repeatedly gesture to the vastness of geopolitical landscapes (the required self-reflexive move that marks a reading as limited to the West while more knowledge awaits us in the Rest), little effort is made to translate those gestures to the content of citations.1 There continues to be a paucity of comparative histories of sexuality that engage, for example, the various temporalities within which the idea of the early modern sutures itself to the category of sex across geographies and linguistic formations.2 Simply put, thinking sex with geosemiotics makes opacity a concept ineluctably linked to asymmetry, whereby a geographical location garners value through its (untranslatable) relationship to the West-in other words, through the labor of incommensurability.3 In so doing, we recast as it were, over and over again, the debates inaugurated by Gayatri Spivak's seminal essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? as histories of elsewheres perform necessary scenes of nonrepresentability and reprieve (recall Spivak's opening invocation of the conversation between first-world intellectuals Deleuze and Foucault). …

Convergence and Globalization in the Japanese Videogame Industry

For contemporary media scholars, means more than technologies or content coming together in one box.' It instead alludes to the of content across media platforms, and the joining together of media producers and consumers in the production and negotiation of that content through user-generated content, greater feedback mechanisms for consumers, or fan-driven media campaigns. Yet apart from a sidebar mentioning the impor tance that both Western and Japanese fans have played in the global popularity of Japanese anime, most examples that HenryJenkins cites in Convergence Culture, and the majority of work done by other media scholars, focuses on Western media products and companies.2 This essay addresses that omission and advocates further inves tigation regarding the Japanese game industry by studying three companies successful in developing and publishing games, along with a range of other activities. Those companies are Bandai Namco, Square Enix, and Konami. I chose these three for several reasons. First, all released annual reports for 2007, which formed the starting point of analysis. Second, the companies have had long histories and have all weathered multiple console releases, as well as evolving cul tural, technological, social, and political developments. None of the three are principally console manufacturers, like Sony and Nintendo. Those companies would make comparisons more difficult, as hard ware and software production are different undertakings. And finally, I chose companies that acted as both developers and publishers and who had diversified holdings. Not allJapanese videogame companies are this diverse in their ownership and business strategies; it is exactly their diversity that makes these three companies particularly interest ing and important.3 This essay investigates how these companies are negotiating the convergence culture thatJenkins writes about. Next, it examines how