Do Better ESG Ratings Boost Bond Holders?
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings should reflect the risks that such factors pose to a company’s financial performance and how well equipped that company is to manage those risks.…
“Build, Partner and Buy”: AI and the New M&A Model
Amid the current artificial intelligence (AI) hype cycle, companies are jockeying for an edge in this fast-developing sector. So far this year, software M&A is staging a comeback. After bottoming…
Steve Blank Before there was Oppenheimer there was Vannevar Bush
I just saw the movie Oppenheimer. A wonderful movie on multiple levels. But the Atomic Bomb story that starts at Los Alamos with Oppenheimer and General Grove misses the fact…
Myron Scholes on Black–Scholes, Decarbonization, AI, and Parenting
Through his examinations of how uncertainty influences asset prices, Nobel laureate Myron Scholes has helped revolutionize our understanding of the financial markets. His development of the Black–Scholes options pricing model…
The Trouble with Forecasting Home Prices
Introduction Mortgage rates have doubled and tripled in some countries since 2021. So, why aren’t residential real estate markets more distressed? For example, the average home price-to-income ratio in the…
Climate Change, Risk Management, and the Freedom to Invest Responsibly
Risk management is so simple a concept and so central to financial analysis that it feels superfluous to even mention it. Yet when it comes to climate change and sustainability,…
Crypto’s Unanswered Question: At What Price?
Franklin J. Parker, CFA, is the author of Goals-Based Portfolio Theory, published by Wiley. Last summer, I was having lunch on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy with a few other…
Crypto Rising? Beyond High Beta Equity and FTX
Introduction Traditional finance had two dominant perspectives on cryptoassets as 2022 drew to a close. Some saw bitcoin and the like as merely stand-ins for high beta equity market exposure.…
Quit to Win? Six Reasons Why Winners Quit
Binod Shankar, CFA, is the author of Let’s Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager. Sometimes quitting is the right thing to do, whether it is leaving a city,…
The First US Real Estate Bubble and Three Lessons from the Mount Tambora Eruption
Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP, is the author, with Elliot Chambers, of “The Panic of 1819, Silicon Valley Bank and the Dangers of Bank Runs,” from the Summer 2023 issue…
