Substantial inflows into passive funds over the last decade have led to speculatioon that a bubble is forming. Key concerns center around the lack of price discovery inherent with passive funds as well as liquidity during market dislocations. While conerns may be valid, empirical data does not seem to support the case for a bubble.
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There is a yawning gender gap in Corporate America. Studies show that companies with disproportionately low numbers of women in leadership do not perform as well as those with a more balanced gender ratio. For years, boards have vowed to change that formula, yet still it remains. To help spur changes, the Women CEOs Speak project was initiated and 57 women CEOs were interviewed for it. The ultimate goal: 100 women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies by 2025.
Consumer confidence measures have been mixed amid heightened geopolitical noise. The global manufacturing slowdown has pulled that sub-set of the U.S. economy into contraction territory and threatens business investment. Key service-based readings have maintained resilient growth in the U.S. Currencies around the world have fallen versus the U.S. Dollar, with the "safe-haven" Japanese Yen being the notable exception. The U.S.-China relations induced periodic bouts of volatility, and the matter goes beyond unresolved trade/tariff issues.
More and more investors are considering an allocation to commodities, typically motivated by a desire to tap the inflation-fighting and diversifying properties of this asset class. While the most natural way to get commodity exposure is by investing in a portfolio of commodity futures, many investors (and consultants) believe owning a portfolio of natural resource stocks is an easier method.
Prices of commodities and the US dollar are strongly linked. But is this also true at the individual commodity level?
Passive doesn't mean indifferent. Often people lose sight of the fact that while passive, or index, investors have made a choice to diversify and trust the market to reward them for their investments in the long run, they still want positive performance. And influencing corporate behavior for the better is a key way for them to achieve that. As assets continue to flow from active management to index investing, passive shareholders will still hold companies to account.
What are the tax benefits of investing in Qualified Opportunity Funds? A closer look assesses the opportunities —and the risks.
It is often heard that 'good talent' is hard to find. But what constitutes a good talent? And where are companies going to find the talent they need when the gap between worker supply and demand continues to widen? This podcast with John Hilton, news editor of HRD magazine, Andrew Lafontaine, and Felicity O'Shannassy, organizational strategy experts at Korn Ferry, focuses on understanding the imminent skilled workers crisis and what HR and business leaders can do to mitigate the impact of the Talent Crunch.
With the longest economic expansion on record currently underway in the United States, it is hard to imagine that capital markets and investments were in utter disarray a little over ten years ago. Or that technology stocks—the darling of equity markets today—took a severe beating two decades back. We believe that when the going is good (and has been for an extraordinarily long time), it is prudent to rebalance investment portfolios away from highperforming assets, especially at this late stage of the economic cycle.
For two months, a financial services firm in New Zealand cut its workweek to four eight-hour days but paid for five days—and invited university researchers to study the impact on performance. Very quickly, the results became clear: workers showed up on time and creativity burgeoned. Productivity rose 20 percent. The policy became permanent. The idea of a shorter workweek is even trickling over to America. Interestingly, the sports world is providing some of the best evidence that these types of changes may help.