1.
Nasdaq Composite
–
The NASDAQ Composite is a stock market index of the common stocks and similar securities listed on the NASDAQ stock market. Along with the Dow Jones Average and S&P500 it is one of the three most-followed indices in US stock markets, the composition of the NASDAQ Composite is heavily weighted towards information technology companies. On April 23rd 2015, after over 15 years, the made a new closing high of 5056.06. On June 18,2015, the made a new all-time high of 5143.32. In the days following the election win of Donald Trump. The NASDAQ100, whose components are a subset of the NASDAQ Composites, accounts for over 90% of the NASDAQ Composites movement, the index was launched in 1971, with a starting value of 100. On July 17,1995, the index closed above the 1,000 mark for the first time and it made steady gains in the following years to reach 2,000 points by 1998, then began to accelerate significantly. This process mushroomed in late 1999, the index closed that year at 4,069.31 points. On March 10,2000, the index finally peaked at a high of 5,132.52. The decline from this peak signalled the beginning of the bubble burst. There were multiple things contributing to this Dot-com boom and bust, more pessimistic types were concerned that business would require massive technology replacement to achieve Y2K compatibility. The index declined to half its value within a year, and finally hit the bottom of the market trend on October 10,2002. While the index gradually recovered since then, it did not trade for more than half of its value until May 2007. The 2000s brought a mix of pessimistic news stemming from the Early 2000s recession, the September 11 attacks, furthermore, the failure of Lehman Brothers in September brought world financial markets into turmoil. The NASDAQ was no exception, experiencing record levels of market volatility, on September 29,2008, the NASDAQ dropped nearly 200 points, the most since the tech bubble burst, losing 9. 14% to fall beneath the 2,000 level. Conversely, on October 13,2008, the NASDAQ recorded a gain of nearly 200 points, on March 9,2009, the composite hit a six-year intra-day low of 1,265.52 before recovering under the influence of Federal Reserve quantitative easing. This first occurred intra-day on February 29,2012, before further volatile pullbacks, later in 2012, the index managed a yearly close above 3,000 for only the second time in its history, with a total of 3,019.51 points. With the extension of relatively low tax rates for most incomes, on November 26,2013, the index made its first close above 4,000 since September 7,2000
2.
Economic bubble
–
An economic bubble or asset bubble is trade in an asset at a price or price range that strongly deviates from the corresponding assets intrinsic value. It could also be described as a situation in which asset prices appear to be based on implausible or inconsistent views about the future, Asset bubbles date back as far as the 1600s and are now widely regarded as a recurrent feature of modern economic history. Because it is difficult to observe intrinsic values in real-life markets, bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect. Such a drop is known as a crash or a bubble burst, prices in an economic bubble can fluctuate erratically, and become impossible to predict from supply and demand alone. While some economists deny that bubbles occur, the cause of bubbles remains disputed by those who are convinced that asset prices often deviate strongly from intrinsic values. Many explanations have suggested, and research has recently shown that bubbles may appear even without uncertainty, speculation. In such cases, the bubbles may be argued to be rational and these approaches require that the timing of the bubble collapse can only be forecast probabilistically and the bubble process is often modelled using a Markov switching model. Similar explanations suggest that bubbles might ultimately be caused by processes of price coordination, more recent theories of asset bubble formation suggest that these events are sociologically driven. For instance, explanations have focused on emerging social norms and the role that culturally-situated stories or narratives play in these events and this was one of the earliest modern financial crises, other episodes were referred to as manias, as in the Dutch tulip mania. The metaphor indicated that the prices of the stock were inflated and fragile – expanded based on nothing but air, and vulnerable to a sudden burst, as in fact occurred. The impact of economic bubbles is debated within and between schools of thought, they are not generally considered beneficial, but its debated how harmful their formation. Political economist Robert E. Wright argues that bubbles can be identified before the fact with high confidence. A protracted period of low risk premiums can simply prolong the downturn in asset price deflation as was the case of the Great Depression in the 1930s for much of the world and the 1990s for Japan. Not only can the aftermath of a crash devastate the economy of a nation, another important aspect of economic bubbles is their impact on spending habits. Market participants with overvalued assets tend to spend more because they feel richer, many observers quote the housing market in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and parts of the United States in recent times, as an example of this effect. In an economy with a bank, the bank may therefore attempt to keep an eye on asset price appreciation. This is usually done by increasing the interest rate, in the 1970s, excess monetary expansion after the U. S. came off the gold standard created massive commodities bubbles. These bubbles only ended when the U. S, central Bank finally reined in the excess money, raising federal funds interest rates to over 14%
3.
Speculation
–
Speculation is the purchase of an asset with the hope that it will become more valuable at a future date. Many speculators pay little attention to the value of a security. Speculation can in principle involve any tradable good or financial instrument, Speculators are particularly common in the markets for stocks, bonds, commodity futures, currencies, fine art, collectibles, real estate, and derivatives. The number of shareholders increased, perhaps, from 4.4 million in 1900 to 26 million in 1932, the view of what distinguishes investment from speculation and speculation from excessive speculation varies widely among pundits, legislators and academics. Some sources note that speculation is simply a higher form of investment. Others define speculation more narrowly as positions not characterized as hedging, the agency emphasizes that speculators serve important market functions, but defines excessive speculation as harmful to the proper functioning of futures markets. According to Ben Graham in The Intelligent Investor, the prototypical defensive investor is. one interested chiefly in safety plus freedom from bother, Speculation is condemned on ethical-moral grounds as creating money from money and thereby promoting the vices of avarice and gambling. When a harvest is too small to satisfy consumption at its rate, speculators come in. Their purchases raise the price, thereby checking consumption so that the supply will last longer. Producers encouraged by the price further lessen the shortage by growing or importing to reduce the shortage. On the other side, when the price is higher than the speculators think the facts warrant and this reduces prices, encouraging consumption and exports and helping to reduce the surplus. If any market, such as pork bellies, had no speculators, with fewer players in the market, there would be a larger spread between the current bid and ask price of pork bellies. By contrast, a commodity speculator may profit the difference in the spread and, in competition with other speculators, some schools of thought argue that speculators increase the liquidity in a market, and therefore promote an efficient market. This efficiency is difficult to achieve without speculators, a very beneficial by-product of speculation for the economy is price discovery. On the other hand, as more speculators participate in a market, underlying real demand and supply can diminish compared to trading volume, Speculators also perform a very important risk bearing role that is beneficial to society. For example, a farmer might be considering planting corn on some unused farmland, however, he might not want to do so because he is concerned that the price might fall too far by harvest time. By selling his crop in advance at a price to a speculator, he is now able to hedge the price risk. Thus, speculators can actually increase production through their willingness to take on risk, hence, they make the prices better reflect the true quality of operation of the firms
4.
Internet
–
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, the primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the two decades since then, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet, the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries, the Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage, each constituent network sets its own policies. The term Internet, when used to refer to the global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, is a proper noun. In common use and the media, it is not capitalized. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, the Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, however, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks, the term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of growth, fifteen sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks, early international collaborations on the ARPANET were rare. European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks, in December 1974, RFC675, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later RFCs repeated this use. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network, in 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990
5.
Stock market index
–
A stock index or stock market index is a measurement of the value of a section of the stock market. It is computed from the prices of selected stocks and it is a tool used by investors and financial managers to describe the market, and to compare the return on specific investments. An index is a construct, so it may not be invested in directly. But many mutual funds and exchange-traded funds attempt to track an index, Stock market indices may be classified in many ways. A world or global stock market index — such as the MSCI World or the S&P Global 100 — includes stocks from multiple regions, regions may be defined geographically or by levels of industrialization or income. A national index represents the performance of the market of a given nation—and by proxy. Other indices may be regional, such as the FTSE Developed Europe Index or the FTSE Developed Asia Pacific Index, indexes may be based on exchange, such as the NASDAQ-100 or NYSE US100, or groups of exchanges, such as the Euronext 100 or OMX Nordic 40. The concept may be extended well beyond an exchange, russell Investment Group added to the family of indices by launching the Russel Global Index. More specialized indices exist tracking the performance of specific sectors of the market, some indices, such as the S&P500, have multiple versions. These versions can differ based on how the components are weighted. The difference between the full capitalization, float-adjusted, and equal weight versions is in how index components are weighted, an index may also be classified according to the method used to determine its price. In contrast, an index such as the Hang Seng Index factors in the size of the company. Thus, a small shift in the price of a large company will heavily influence the value of the index. Traditionally, capitalization- or share-weighted indices all had a full weighting, recently, many of them have changed to a float-adjusted weighting which helps indexing. An equal-weighted index is one in all components are assigned the same value. For example, the Barrons 400 Index assigns a value of 0. 25% to each of the 400 stocks included in the index. A modified capitalization-weighted index is a hybrid between capitalization weighting and equal weighting, moreover, in 2005, Standard & Poors introduced the S&P Pure Growth Style Index and S&P Pure Value Style Index which was attribute-weighted. For these two indexes, a score is calculated for every stock, be it their growth score or the value score, one argument for capitalization weighting is that investors must, in aggregate, hold a capitalization-weighted portfolio anyway
6.
Pets.com
–
Pets. com was a dot-com enterprise that sold pet supplies to retail customers. It began operations in August 1998 and closed in November 2000, a high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine, although sales rose dramatically due to the attention, the company was weak on fundamentals and lost money on most of its sales. Its high public profile during its existence made it one of the more noteworthy failures of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s. US$300 million of investment capital vanished with the companys failure, the company was headquartered in San Francisco. Pets. com was an online business that sold pet accessories and supplies direct to consumers over the World Wide Web. It launched in August 1998 and went from an IPO on a stock exchange to liquidation in 268 days. Other similar business-to-consumer companies from the period include Webvan and Boo. com. After its start by Greg McLemore, the site and domain was purchased in early 1999 by leading venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, amazon. com was involved in pets. coms first round of venture funding, purchasing a majority 54% stake in the company. The CEO of Pets. com said of Amazons investment, This is a made in heaven. Pets. com bought out one online competitor, Petstore. com, the company rolled out a regional advertising campaign using a variety of media. It started with a five-city advertising campaign rollout and then expanded the campaign to 10 cities by Christmas,1999, the company succeeded wildly in making its mascot, the Pets. com sock puppet, well known. The Pets. com site design was well received, garnering several advertising awards. That ad was ranked #1 by USA Todays Ad Meter and had the highest recall of any ad that ran during the Super Bowl, the company went public in February 2000, the former Nasdaq stock symbol was IPET. Pets. com made significant investments in such as their warehousing. Pets. com management maintained that the company needed to get to a run rate that supported this infrastructure buildout. They believed that the target was close to $300 million to hit the break even point. This time period was based on growth of Internet shopping and the percentage of pet owners that shopped on the Internet, despite its success in building brand recognition, it was uncertain whether a substantial market niche existed for Pets. com
7.
Webvan
–
Webvan was an online grocery business that went bankrupt in 2001. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States and it delivered products to customers homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US markets, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, Sacramento, the company had hoped to expand to 26 cities. In June 2008, CNET named Webvan the largest dot-com flop in history, placing it above Pets. com and it is now owned and operated by Amazon. com. Webvan was founded in the heyday of the bubble in 1996 by Louis Borders. Venture capitalists, including Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Softbank Capital, Goldman Sachs, invested more than $396 million in Webvan. They encouraged it to build its own infrastructure to deliver groceries in a number of cities. The company raised $375 million in a public offering in November 1999 that valued the company at more than $4.8 billion. Up to that time, the company had reported cumulative revenue of $395,000, HomeGrocer, a similar company, started operating the year before Webvan. It went public in March 2000 and, like Webvan, was losing large amounts of money, on 26 June 2000, Webvan bought out HomeGrocer. While Webvan was popular, the money spent on infrastructure far exceeded sales growth, Webvan placed a $1 billion order with engineering company Bechtel to build its warehouses, and bought a fleet of delivery trucks. As part of its process, all non-perishable food was donated to local food banks. Webvans legacy consists of thousands of colored plastic shipping bins, now used for household storage, the online grocery market sector in North America has seen many other failures, including Publix Direct. However, there have been a few successes, two companies founded around the same time as Webvan that still exist today are Peapod started in 1989 in Chicago and SimonDelivers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region of Minnesota and Wisconsin. A number of chain stores also started offering online ordering. Amazon has also recently unveiled AmazonFresh, a grocery delivery service serving Seattle, Washington and Los Angeles. As of January,2009, Webvan. com is operating as part of the Amazon. com family, in the UK, Ocado launched as a concept shortly after webvan in 2000, and started operations in 2002 following a very similar business model, but without giving credit. It subsequently listed in 2010 and reached a market capitalisation of GBP2. 5bn as of Q42013, Ocado has been profitable at the operating level since 2011, showing the business model may indeed be viable if expansion is kept in check
8.
Cisco Systems
–
Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, WebEx, and Jasper, Cisco specializes into specific tech markets, such as Internet of Things, domain security, and energy management. Cisco is the largest networking company in the world, the stock was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 8,2009, and is also included in the S&P500 Index, the Russell 1000 Index, NASDAQ-100 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Stock Index. By the time the company went public in 1990, when it was listed on the NASDAQ, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world by 2000, with a more than $500 billion market capitalization. Despite founding Cisco in 1984, Bosack, along with Kirk Lougheed, continued to work at Stanford on Ciscos first product and it consisted of exact replicas of Stanfords Blue Box router and a stolen copy of the Universitys multiple-protocol router software. The software was written some years earlier at Stanford medical school by research engineer William Yeager. Bosack and Lougheed adapted it into what became the foundation for Cisco IOS, in 1987, Stanford licensed the router software and two computer boards to Cisco. In addition to Bosack, Lerner and Lougheed, Greg Satz, a programmer, and Richard Troiano, the companys first CEO was Bill Graves, who held the position from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge was appointed CEO, the name Cisco was derived from the city name San Francisco, which is why the companys engineers insisted on using the lower case cisco in its early years. The logo is intended to depict the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, on February 16,1990, Cisco Systems went public and was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. On August 28,1990, Lerner was fired, upon hearing the news, her husband Bosack resigned in protest. The couple walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was committed to their own charity, although Cisco was not the first company to develop and sell dedicated network nodes, it was one of the first to sell commercially successful routers supporting multiple network protocols. Classical, CPU-based architecture of early Cisco devices coupled with flexibility of operating system IOS allowed for keeping up with evolving technology needs by means of frequent software upgrades, some popular models of that time managed to stay in production for almost a decade virtually unchanged—a rarity in high-tech industry. This philosophy dominated the companys product lines throughout the 1990s, in 1995, John Morgridge was succeeded by John Chambers. The phenomenal growth of the Internet in mid-to-late 1990s quickly changed the telecom landspe, as the Internet Protocol became widely adopted, the importance of multi-protocol routing declined. In late March 2000, at the height of the bubble, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world. In July 2014, with a cap of about US$129 billion. One of them, Juniper Networks, shipped their first product in 1999, Cisco answered the challenge with homegrown ASICs and fast processing cards for GSR routers and Catalyst 6500 switches. In 2004, Cisco also started migration to new high-end hardware CRS-1, as part of a massive rebranding campaign in 2006, Cisco Systems adopted the shortened name Cisco and created The Human Network advertising campaign
9.
Qualcomm
–
Qualcomm is an American multinational semiconductor and telecommunications equipment company that designs and markets wireless telecommunications products and services. It derives most of its revenue from chipmaking and the bulk of its profit from patent licensing businesses, the company headquarters are located in San Diego, California, United States, and has 224 worldwide locations. The parent company is Qualcomm Incorporated, which includes the Qualcomm Technology Licensing Division, Jacobs and Viterbi had previously founded Linkabit. In 1990, Qualcomm began the design of the first CDMA-based cellular base station and this work began as a study contract from AirTouch which was facing a shortage of cellular capacity in Los Angeles. Two years later Qualcomm began to manufacture CDMA cell phones, base stations, the initial base stations were not reliable and the technology was licensed wholly to Nortel in return for their work in improving the base station switching. The first CDMA technology was standardized as IS-95, Qualcomm has since helped to establish the CDMA2000, WCDMA and LTE cellular standards. The following year, Qualcomm acquired Eudora, a client for PC that could be used with the OmniTRACS system. The acquisition associated a widely used email client with a company that was little-known at the time, in 1997, Qualcomm paid $18 million for the naming rights to the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, renaming it to Qualcomm Stadium. The naming rights belong to Qualcomm until 2017. In 1999, Qualcomm sold its base station business to Ericsson, the company was now focused on developing and licensing wireless technologies and selling ASICs that implement them. Steve Mollenkopf was promoted to president and chief operating officer of the company, mollenkopfs appointment as CEO was announced on December 13,2013 and took effect on March 4,2014. He succeeded Paul E. Jacobs, who remains executive chairman, CFO Bill Keitel retired and was replaced by Applied Materials CFO George Davis on March 11,2013. Vista Equity Partners took over the Omnitracs business from Qualcomm Incorporated in November 2013, in October 2014, Qualcomm wrapped up a deal for chip maker CSR Plc for a fee of $2.5 billion, beating its biggest rival Microchip Technology. However, surprised by the release of the 64-bit Apple A7 in September 2013, furthermore, Qualcomm was facing anti-trust investigations in China, the European Union, and the United States. The combination of pressures caused a significant fall in Qualcomms profits. In July 2015, the company cut 4,700 jobs or about 15 percent of its 31,300 current workforce due to decline of sales, executive management knew this was coming so they came up with a plan to retain its employees. However, instead of paying reasonable salary, executive management used this plan as a justification to give themselves a big payout first and then lay off employees later. In December 2015, Qualcomm Inc. announced that it had rejected calls to split itself in two, deciding to keep its chipmaking and patent licensing businesses together
10.
EBay
–
EBay Inc. is a multinational e-commerce corporation, facilitating online consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales. It is headquartered in San Jose, California, eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. Today it is a business with operations in about 30 countries. The company manages eBay. com, an auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods. It previously offered online money transfers, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay from 2002 until 2015, the website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items and again when those items are sold. The AuctionWeb was founded in California on September 3,1995 by French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as part of a personal site. One of the first items sold on AuctionWeb was a laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained, Im a collector of broken laser pointers and this was revealed in Adam Cohens book, The Perfect Store, and confirmed by eBay. Reportedly, eBay was simply a hobby for Omidyar until his Internet service provider informed him he would need to upgrade to a business account due to the high volume of traffic to his website. The resulting price increase forced him to start charging those who used eBay and it resulted in the hiring of Chris Agarpao as eBays first employee to handle the number of checks coming in for fees. Jeffrey Skoll was hired as the first president of the company in early 1996, growth was phenomenal, in January 1997 the site hosted 2,000,000 auctions, compared with 250,000 during the whole of 1996. The company officially changed the name of its service from AuctionWeb to eBay in September 1997, originally, the site belonged to Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyars consulting firm. Omidyar had tried to register the domain name echobay. com, but found it already taken by the Echo Bay Mines, in 1997, the company received $6.7 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Meg Whitman was hired as eBay President and CEO in March 1998, at the time, the company had 30 employees, half a million users and revenues of $4.7 million in the United States. EBay went public on September 21,1998, and both Omidyar and Skoll became instant billionaires, eBays target share price of $18 was all but ignored as the price went to $53.50 on the first day of trading. As the company expanded product categories beyond collectibles into almost any saleable item, in February 2002, the company purchased iBazar, a similar European auction web site founded in 1998, and then bought PayPal on October 3,2002. By early 2008, the company had expanded worldwide, counted hundreds of millions of registered users,15, after nearly ten years at eBay, Whitman decided to enter politics
11.
Amazon (company)
–
Amazon. com, also called Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company that was founded on July 5,1994, by Jeff Bezos and is based in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales, the company also produces consumer electronics—notably, Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo—and is the worlds largest provider of cloud infrastructure services. Amazon also sells certain low-end products like USB cables under its in-house brand AmazonBasics. Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to other countries for some of its products. In 2016, Dutch, Polish, and Turkish language versions of the German Amazon website were launched. In 2015, Amazon surpassed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization, in 1994, Bezos left his employment as vice-president of D. E. Shaw & Co. a Wall Street firm and moved to Seattle. He began to work on a plan for what would eventually become Amazon. com. Bezos incorporated the company as Cadabra on July 5,1994, Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later after a lawyer misheard its original name as cadaver. In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless. com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, the domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer. The company went online as Amazon. com in 1995, Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand, telling a reporter, Theres nothing about our model that cant be copied over time. But you know, McDonalds got copied, and it still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name, brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world. Additionally, a beginning with A was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of any list that was alphabetized. Since June 19,2000, Amazons logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile. After reading a report about the future of the Internet that projected annual Web commerce growth at 2, 300% and he narrowed the list to what he felt were the five most promising products, which included, compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos and books. Amazon was founded in the garage of Bezos home in Bellevue, the company began as an online bookstore, an idea spurred off with discussion with John Ingram of Ingram Book, along with Keyur Patel who still holds a stake in Amazon. Amazon was able to access books at wholesale from Ingram, in the first two months of business, Amazon sold to all 50 states and over 45 countries
12.
Mosaic (web browser)
–
NCSA Mosaic, or simply Mosaic, is a discontinued early web browser. It has been credited with popularizing the World Wide Web and it was also a client for earlier protocols such as File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and gopher. The browser was named for its support of multiple internet protocols and its intuitive interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web, as well as on Microsoft operating systems. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window, while often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise and ViolaWWW. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign beginning in late 1992, NCSA released the browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7,1997. However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA, Netscape Navigator was later developed by Netscape, which employed many of the original Mosaic authors, however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigators code descendant is Mozilla Firefox, starting in 1995 Mosaic lost a lot of share to Netscape Navigator, and by 1997 only had a tiny fraction of users left, by which time the project was discontinued. Microsoft licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer in 1995, david Thompson tested ViolaWWW and showed the application to Marc Andreessen. Andreessen and Eric Bina originally designed and programmed NCSA Mosaic for Unixs X Window System called xmosaic, then, in December 1991, the Gore Bill created and introduced by then Senator and future Vice President Al Gore was passed, which provided the funding for the Mosaic project. Marc Andreessen announced the project on Jan 23,1993, the first alpha release was published in June 1993, and the first beta release followed quickly thereafter in September 1993. Version 1.0 for Windows was released on November 11,1993, NCSA Mosaic for Unix version 2.0 was released on November 10,1993. A port of Mosaic to the Commodore Amiga was available by October 1993, ports to Windows and Macintosh had already been released in September. From 1994 to 1997, the National Science Foundation supported the development of Mosaic. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator,1994 saw the first commercial product to incorporate Mosaic, SCO Global Access, a modified version of its Open Desktop version of Unix that served as an Internet gateway. Spyglass, Inc. licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code, Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million, the 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook, The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states, in a section called Coming Attractions, that Internet Explorer will be based on the Mosaic program. Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated Based on NCSA Mosaic in the About box, Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic. The licensing terms for NCSA Mosaic were generous for a software program
13.
World Wide Web
–
The World Wide Web is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and he wrote the first web browser computer program in 1990 while employed at CERN in Switzerland. The Web browser was released outside of CERN in 1991, first to research institutions starting in January 1991. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet, Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language. In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, audio, embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a theme, a common domain name. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactive where users contribute content or the content depends upon the user or their actions, websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial, governmental, or non-governmental organisational purposes. In the 2006 Great British Design Quest organised by the BBC and the Design Museum, Tim Berners-Lees vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s. By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe, in 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN. Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the meanings of the word hypertext. At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0. The proposal was modelled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the worlds first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the necessary for a working Web, the first web browser. The first web site, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990, jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt. hypertext. This date is confused with the public availability of the first web servers. The first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California, accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event
14.
Digital divide
–
A digital divide is an economic and social inequality with regard to access to, use of, or impact of information and communication technologies. The divide within countries may refer to inequalities between individuals, households, businesses, or geographic areas, usually at different socioeconomic levels or other demographic categories, the term digital divide describes a gap in terms of access to and usage of information and communication technology. Which characteristics or attributes are distinguished to describe the divide, income, education, age, geographic location, motivation, reason not to use, how sophisticated is the usage, mere access, retrieval, interactivity, intensive and extensive in usage, innovative contributions, etc. To what does the subject connect, fixed or mobile, Internet or telephony, digital TV, broadband, different authors focus on different aspects, which leads to a large variety of definitions of the digital divide. Each one of them seems equally reasonable and depends on the objective pursued by the analyst, traditionally the nature of the divide has been measured in terms of the existing numbers of subscriptions and digital devices. Given the increasing number of devices, some have concluded that the digital divide among individuals has increasingly been closing as the result of a natural. Recent studies have measured the digital divide not in terms of technological devices, as shown in the Figure on the side, the digital divide in kbit/s is not monotonically decreasing, but re-opens up with each new innovation. This is because a new kind of connectivity is never introduced instantaneously and uniformly to society as a whole at once, as shown by the Figure, during the mid-2000s, communication capacity was more unequally distributed than during the late 1980s, when only fixed-line phones existed. The most recent increase in digital equality stems from the diffusion of the latest digital innovations. The upper graph of the Figure on the shows that the divide between developed and developing countries has been diminishing when measured in terms of subscriptions per capita. In 2001, fixed-line telecommunication penetration reached 70% of society in developed OECD countries and this resulted in a ratio of 7 to 1 or a difference of 60%. During the next decade, fixed-line penetration stayed almost constant in OECD countries, while the rest of the started a catch-up. The lower graph shows the divide not in terms of ICT devices, while the average member of developed countries counted with 29 kbit/s more than a person in developing countries in 2001, this difference got multiplied by a factor of one thousand. This shows the importance of measuring the divide in terms of kbit/s, the International Telecommunications Union concludes that the bit becomes a unifying variable enabling comparisons and aggregations across different kinds of communication technologies. However, research shows that the divide is more than just an access issue. There are at least three factors at play, information accessibility, information utilization and information receptiveness, more than just accessibility, individuals need to know how to make use of the information and communication tools once they exist within a community. Internet connectivity can be utilized at a variety of such as homes, offices, schools, libraries, public spaces, Internet cafe. There are also varying levels of connectivity in rural, suburban, the gap in a digital divide may exist for a number of reasons
15.
Information Age
–
The onset of the Information Age is associated with the Digital Revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the onset of the Industrial Age. The Information Age formed by capitalizing on computer microminiaturization advances, library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs and he did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission media. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of information growth, moores law, which was formulated around 1965, calculated that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Connectivity between computers within companies led to the ability of workers at different levels to access greater amounts of information. The worlds technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000 and it is estimated that the worlds capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014. This is the equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from the earth to the sun. In the 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to, technology was developing so quickly that a computer costing $3000 in 1997 would cost $2000 two years later and $1000 the following year. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance, the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored, the number of synaptic operations per second in a human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanitys general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second, estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage, eventually, Information and Communication Technology—computers, computerized machinery, fiber optics, communication satellites, Internet, and other ICT tools—became a significant part of the economy. Microcomputers were developed and many businesses and industries were changed by ICT. Nicholas Negroponte captured the essence of these changes in his 1995 book and his book discusses similarities and differences between products made of atoms and products made of bits. In essence, a copy of a made of bits can be made cheaply and quickly. The Information Age has affected the workforce in several ways and it has created a situation in which workers who perform easily automated tasks are forced to find work that is not easily automated. Workers are also being forced to compete in a job market. Lastly, workers are being replaced by computers that can do their jobs faster and this poses problems for workers in industrial societies, which are still to be solved. However, solutions that involve lowering the time are usually highly resisted
16.
Information technology
–
Information technology is the application of computers to store, study, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data, or information, often in the context of a business or other enterprise. IT is considered a subset of information and communications technology, the term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones. Several industries are associated with technology, including computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, internet, telecom equipment. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that the new technology not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology, based on the storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development, pre-mechanical, mechanical, electromechanical, electronic. This article focuses on the most recent period, which began in about 1940, devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick. Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s, the electromechanical Zuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the worlds first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. Colossus, developed during the Second World War to decrypt German messages was the first electronic digital computer, although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory, programming was carried out using plugs, the first recognisably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, by comparison the first transistorised computer, developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version. Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes. IBM introduced the first hard drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is stored magnetically on hard disks. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally, 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007. Database management systems emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly, one of the earliest such systems was IBMs Information Management System, which is still widely deployed more than 50 years later
17.
Capital gains tax in the United States
–
In the United States of America, individuals and corporations pay U. S. federal income tax on the net total of all their capital gains. The tax rate depends on both the tax bracket and the amount of time the investment was held. Short-term capital gains are taxed at the ordinary income tax rate and are defined as investments held for a year or less before being sold. Long-term capital gains, on dispositions of assets held for more one year, are taxed at a lower rate. As of 2016, the United States taxes short-term capital gains at the rate as it taxes ordinary income. Long-term capital gains are taxed at lower rates, shown in color in the table below, The tax on collectibles. The tax on unrecaptured Section 1250 gain — the portion of gains on depreciable real estate that has been or could have claimed as depreciation — is capped at 25%. The tax on most other investments is at a rate of 0%, 15%, or 20%. There may be taxes in addition to the tax rates shown in the above table, taxpayers earning income above certain thresholds pay an additional 3. 8% tax on all investment income. Therefore, the top tax rate on long-term capital gains is 23. 8%. State and local taxes often apply to capital gains, in a state whose tax is stated as a percentage of the federal tax liability, the percentage is easy to calculate. Some states structure their taxes differently, in this case, the treatment of long-term and short-term gains does not necessarily correspond to the federal treatment. Capital gains do not push ordinary income into a higher income bracket, the capital gain that is taxed is the excess of the sale price over the cost basis of the asset. The taxpayer reduces the price and increases the cost basis to reflect transaction costs such as brokerage fees, certain legal fees. In contrast, when a business is entitled to a deduction on an asset used in the business, it reduces the cost basis of that asset by that amount. The reduction in basis occurs whether or not the business claims the depreciation, if the business then sells the asset for a gain, this part of the gain is called depreciation recapture. When selling certain real estate, it may be treated as capital gain, when selling equipment, however, depreciation recapture is generally taxed as ordinary income, not capital gain. Further, when selling some kinds of assets, none of the gain qualifies as capital gain
18.
Alan Greenspan
–
Alan Greenspan KBE is an American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as an adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company. Although he was subdued in his appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a rock star. Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts, yale economist Robert Shiller argues that once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed. Greenspan was born in the Washington Heights area of New York City and his father, Herbert Greenspan, was of Romanian Jewish descent, and his mother, Rose Goldsmith, was of Hungarian Jewish descent. His father worked as a stockbroker and market analyst in New York City, Greenspan attended George Washington High School from 1940 until he graduated in June 1943, where one of his classmates was John Kemeny. He played clarinet and saxophone along with classmate Stan Getz and he further studied clarinet at the Juilliard School from 1943 to 1944. Among his bandmates in the Woody Herman band was Leonard Garment, in 1945, Greenspan attended New York University, where he earned a B. A. degree in economics summa cum laude in 1948 and an M. A. degree in economics in 1950. At Columbia University, he pursued advanced studies under Arthur Burns. In 1977, Greenspan obtained a Ph. D. in economics from New York University and his dissertation is not available from the university since it was removed at Greenspans request in 1987, when he became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In April 2008, however, Barrons obtained a copy and notes that it includes a discussion of soaring housing prices and their effect on consumer spending, it even anticipates a bursting housing bubble. From 1948 to 1953, Greenspan worked as an analyst at The National Industrial Conference Board, in mid-1968, Greenspan agreed to serve Richard Nixon as his coordinator on domestic policy in the nomination campaign. Greenspan has also served as a director for Aluminum Company of America, Automatic Data Processing, Capital Cities/ABC. General Foods, J. P. Morgan & Co. Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, Mobil Corporation, and he was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy organization between 1982 and 1988. He also served as a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, investor, author and commentator Jim Rogers has said that Greenspan lobbied to get this chairmanship. W. Bush blamed Fed policy for not winning a second term, Democratic president Bill Clinton reappointed Greenspan, and consulted him on economic matters. Greenspan lent support to Clintons 1993 deficit reduction program, Greenspan was a fundamentally monetarist in orientation on the economy, and his monetary policy decisions largely followed standard Taylor rule prescriptions. Greenspan also played a key role in organizing the U. S. bailout of Mexico during the 1994-95 Mexican peso crisis, in 2000, Greenspan raised interest rates several times, these actions were believed by many to have caused the bursting of the dot-com bubble
19.
Chair of the Federal Reserve
–
The Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is the head of the central banking system of the United States. The position is colloquially as Chair of the Fed or Fed Chair. The chair is the executive officer of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The chair is chosen by the President of the United States from among the members of the Board of Governors, a chair may be appointed for several consecutive terms. William Martin was the longest serving chair, holding the position from 1951 to 1970, the current chair is Janet Yellen, the first woman to hold the position. She began her term on February 1,2014, and previously served as the Vice-Chair from 2010 to 2014, the current term will end on or about February 1,2018. Section 203 of the Banking Act of 1935 changed the name of the Federal Reserve Board to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the directors salaries were significantly lower and their terms of office were much shorter prior to 1935. In effect, the Federal Reserve Board members in Washington, D. C. were significantly less powerful than the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve Banks prior to 1935, in the 1935 Act, the district heads had their titles changed to President. Thus, Marriner Eccles was the first actual Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board, the others prior to 1935 were Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve System, with much more circumscribed power. The nominees for chair and vice-chair may be chosen by the President from among the sitting Governors for four-year terms, by law, the chair reports twice a year to Congress on the Federal Reserves monetary policy objectives. He or she also testifies before Congress on numerous other issues, the following is a list of past and present Chairs of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. A chair serves for a term after appointment, but may be reappointed for several consecutive four-year terms. As of 2014, there have been a total of fifteen Fed Chairs, history of central banking in the United States Beckhart, Benjamin Haggott. The fourth branch, the Federal Reserves unlikely rise to power, Executive Order 11110 - Amendment of Executive Order No.10289 as Amended, Relating to the Performance of Certain Functions Affecting the Department of the Treasury. Via UCSB. edu Official website Public Statements of the Chairs of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, via the St
20.
Venture capital
–
Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity–an ownership stake–in the companies they invest in. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes some of the firms they support will become successful. The start-ups are usually based on a technology or business model and they are usually from the high technology industries, such as information technology. The typical venture capital investment occurs after a seed funding round. The first round of venture capital to fund growth is called the Series A round. This institution helps identify promising new firms and provide them with finance, technical expertise, mentoring, marketing know-how, and business models. Once integrated into the network, these firms are more likely to succeed. However, venture capitalists decisions are often biased, exhibiting for instance overconfidence and illusion of control, a venture may be defined as a project prospective converted into a process with an adequate assumed risk and investment. With few exceptions, private equity in the first half of the 20th century was the domain of wealthy individuals, the Wallenbergs, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and Warburgs were notable investors in private companies in the first half of the century. In 1938, Laurance S. Rockefeller helped finance the creation of both Eastern Air Lines and Douglas Aircraft, and the Rockefeller family had vast holdings in a variety of companies. Eric M. Warburg founded E. M. Warburg & Co. in 1938, which would ultimately become Warburg Pincus, with investments in both leveraged buyouts and venture capital. The Wallenberg family started Investor AB in 1916 in Sweden and were early investors in several Swedish companies such as ABB, Atlas Copco, Ericsson, before World War II, money orders remained primarily the domain of wealthy individuals and families. Georges Doriot, the father of capitalism, founded INSEAD in 1957. Along with Ralph Flanders and Karl Compton, Doriot founded ARDC in 1946 to encourage investment in businesses run by soldiers returning from World War II. ARDC became the first institutional private-equity investment firm to raise capital from other than wealthy families. ARDC is credited with the first trick when its 1957 investment of $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation would be valued at over $355 million after the initial public offering in 1968. Former employees of ARDC went on to several prominent venture-capital firms including Greylock Partners and Morgan, Holland Ventures. ARDC continued investing until 1971, when Doriot retired, in 1972 Doriot merged ARDC with Textron after having invested in over 150 companies
21.
Investment bank
–
Unlike commercial banks and retail banks, investment banks do not take deposits. From the passage of Glass–Steagall Act in 1933 until its repeal in 1999 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, Other industrialized countries, including G7 countries, have historically not maintained such a separation. As part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, the two main lines of business in investment banking are called the sell side and the buy side. The sell side involves trading securities for cash or for other securities, the buy side involves the provision of advice to institutions that buy investment services. Private equity funds, mutual funds, life insurance companies, unit trusts, an investment bank can also be split into private and public functions with a Chinese wall separating the two to prevent information from crossing. The private areas of the deal with private insider information that may not be publicly disclosed, while the public areas, such as stock analysis. The first company to publicly traded stock was the Dutch East India Company. Investment banking has changed over the years, beginning as a form focused on underwriting security issuance. In the United States, commercial banking and investment banking were separated by the Glass–Steagall Act, the repeal led to more universal banks offering an even greater range of services. Many large commercial banks have therefore developed investment banking divisions through acquisitions, notable large banks with significant investment banks include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Barclays, and Wells Fargo. The traditional service of underwriting security issues has declined as a percentage of revenue, as far back as 1960, 70% of Merrill Lynchs revenue was derived from transaction commissions while traditional investment banking services accounted for 5%. However, Merrill Lynch was a relatively retail-focused firm with a large brokerage network, investment banking is split into front office, middle office, and back office activities. Investment banks offer services to corporations issuing securities and investors buying securities. For corporations, investment bankers offer information on when and how to place their securities on the open market, therefore, investment bankers play a very important role in issuing new security offerings. Front office is described as a revenue generating role. Markets is divided into sales and trading, and research, a pitch book of financial information is generated to market the bank to a potential M&A client, if the pitch is successful, the bank arranges the deal for the client. The investment banking division is divided into industry coverage and product coverage groups. On behalf of the bank and its clients, an investment banks primary function is buying and selling products
22.
Initial public offering
–
Through this process, a privately held company transforms into a public company. Initial public offerings are used by companies to raise the expansion of capital, possibly to monetize the investments of early private investors. A company selling shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors, after the IPO, when shares trade freely in the open market, money passes between public investors. The IPO process is known as going public. Details of the offering are disclosed to potential purchasers in the form of a lengthy document known as a prospectus. Most companies undertake an IPO with the assistance of an investment banking firm acting in the capacity of an underwriter, underwriters provide several services, including help with correctly assessing the value of shares and establishing a public market for shares. Alternative methods such as the dutch auction have also been explored, in terms of size and public participation, the two most notable examples of this method is the Google IPO and Snapchats parent company Snap Inc. China has recently emerged as a major IPO market, with several of the largest IPOs taking place in that country, the earliest form of a company which issued public shares was the case of the publicani during the Roman Republic. Like modern joint-stock companies, the publicani were legal bodies independent of their members whose ownership was divided into shares, there is evidence that these shares were sold to public investors and traded in a type of over-the-counter market in the Forum, near the Temple of Castor and Pollux. The shares fluctuated in value, encouraging the activity of speculators, mere evidence remains of the prices for which partes were sold, the nature of initial public offerings, or a description of stock market behavior. Publicanis lost favor with the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, the first modern IPO occurred in March 1602 when the Dutch East India Company offered shares of the company to the public in order to raise capital. All the shares were tradable, and the shareholders received receipts for the purchase, a share certificate documenting payment and ownership such as we know today was not issued but ownership was instead entered in the companys share register. In the United States, the first IPO was the offering of Bank of North America around 1783. An IPO, therefore, allows a company to tap into a pool of potential investors to provide itself with capital for future growth, repayment of debt. A company selling shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors. Those investors must endure the unpredictable nature of the market to price. After the IPO, when shares trade freely in the open market, for early private investors who choose to sell shares as part of the IPO process, the IPO represents an opportunity to monetize their investment. This type of offering is not dilutive, since no new shares are being created, once a company is listed, it is able to issue additional common shares in a number of different ways, one of which is the follow-on offering
23.
Quaternary sector of the economy
–
The quaternary sector is based on knowledge and skill. It consists of intellectual industries providing information services, such as computing and ICT, consultancy, according to some definitions, the quaternary sector includes other pure services, such as the entertainment industry, and the term has been used to describe media, culture, and government. It has been argued that intellectual services is distinct enough to warrant a separate sector and this sector evolves in well-developed countries and requires a highly educated workforce. Between them, the tertiary and quaternary sectors form the largest part of the UK economy, the number of people who earn their living in these activities is increasing. Companies invest in the sector to promote further expansion. It is seen as a way to higher margins or returns on investment. Research will be directed into cutting costs, tapping into markets, producing innovative ideas, new methods and methods of manufacture. To many industries, such as the industry, the sector is the most valuable because it creates future secondary-sector branded products from which companies may profit. Zoltan Kenessey, U. S. Federal Reserve Board, primary, Secondary, Tertiary and Quaternary Sectors of the Economy
24.
Stock market bubble
–
A stock market bubble is a type of economic bubble taking place in stock markets when market participants drive stock prices above their value in relation to some system of stock valuation. Behavioral finance theory attributes stock market bubbles to cognitive biases that lead to groupthink, bubbles occur not only in real-world markets, with their inherent uncertainty and noise, but also in highly predictable experimental markets. Other theoretical explanations of stock market bubbles have suggested that they are rational, intrinsic, two famous early stock market bubbles were the Mississippi Scheme in France and the South Sea bubble in England. Both bubbles came to an end in 1720, bankrupting thousands of unfortunate investors. Those stories, and many others, are recounted in Charles Mackays 1841 popular account, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, the 1920s saw the widespread introduction of an amazing range of technological innovations including radio, automobiles, aviation and the deployment of electrical power grids. The 1990s was the decade when Internet and e-commerce technologies emerged, stock market bubbles frequently produce hot markets in initial public offerings, since investment bankers and their clients see opportunities to float new stock issues at inflated prices. These hot IPO markets misallocate investment funds to areas dictated by speculative trends, emotional and cognitive biases seem to be the causes of bubbles, but often, when the phenomenon appears, pundits try to find a rationale, so as not to be against the crowd. Thus, sometimes, people will dismiss concerns about overpriced markets by citing a new economy where the old stock valuation rules may no longer apply and this type of thinking helps to further propagate the bubble whereby everyone is investing with the intent of finding a greater fool. Still, some cite the wisdom of crowds and say that price movements really do reflect rational expectations of fundamental returns. Large traders become powerful enough to rock the boat, generating stock market bubbles, the bubble in closed-end country funds in the late 1980s is instructive here, as are the bubbles that occur in experimental asset markets. According to the hypothesis, this doesnt happen, and so any data is wrong. For closed-end country funds, observers can compare the prices to the net asset value per share. For experimental asset markets, observers can compare the prices to the expected returns from holding the stock. In both instances, closed-end country funds and experimental markets, stock prices clearly diverge from fundamental values. Nobel laureate Dr. Vernon Smith has illustrated the closed-end country fund phenomenon with a chart showing prices, at its peak, the Spain Fund traded near $35, nearly triple its Net Asset Value of about $12 per share. It only took a few months for the premiums in closed-end country funds to back to the more typical discounts at which closed-end funds trade. Those who had them at premiums had run out of greater fools. For a while, though, the supply of greater fools had been outstanding, a rising price on any share will attract the attention of investors
25.
Nikkei 225
–
The Nikkei 225, more commonly called the Nikkei, the Nikkei index, or the Nikkei Stock Average, is a stock market index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It has been calculated daily by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper since 1950 and it is a price-weighted index, and the components are reviewed once a year. Currently, the Nikkei is the most widely quoted average of Japanese equities, in fact, it was known as the Nikkei Dow Jones Stock Average from 1975 to 1985. The Nikkei 225 began to be calculated on September 7,1950, since January 2010 the index is updated every 15 seconds during trading sessions. The Nikkei 225 Futures, introduced at Singapore Exchange in 1986, the Nikkei average has deviated sharply from the textbook model of stock averages which grow at a steady exponential rate. Subsequently, it lost nearly all these gains, closing at 7,054.98 on March 10, another major index for the Tokyo Stock Exchange is the Topix. On March 15,2011, the working day after the massive earthquake in the northeast part of Japan, the index dropped over 10% to finish at 8605.15. The index continued to drop throughout 2011, eventually bottoming out at 8160.01 on November 25, putting it at its lowest close since March 10,2009. The Nikkei fell over 17% in 2011, finishing the year at 8455.35, its lowest year-end closing value in nearly thirty years, the Nikkei started 2013 near 10,600, hitting a peak of 15,942 in May. However, shortly afterward, it plunged by almost 10% before rebounding, making it the most volatile stock market index among the developed markets. By 2015, it has reached over 20,000 mark, the index is a price-weighted index. As of late 2014, the company with the largest influence on the index is Fast Retailing, as of February 2017, the Nikkei 225 consists of the following companies, S&P/TOPIX150 Nikkei 225 Components Bloomberg page for NKY, IND Nikkei 225 index on Yahoo. Finance Nikkei 225 index on Google Finance Nikkei 225 profile at Wikinvest Reuters page for. N225
26.
S&P 500 Index
–
The S&P500 index components and their weightings are determined by S&P Dow Jones Indices. It differs from other U. S. stock market indices, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Nasdaq Composite index, because of its diverse constituency and weighting methodology. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices, and many consider it one of the best representations of the U. S. stock market, the National Bureau of Economic Research has classified common stocks as a leading indicator of business cycles. The S&P500 was developed and continued to be maintained by S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P Dow Jones Indices publishes many stock market indices such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P MidCap 400, the S&P SmallCap 600, and the S&P Composite 1500. It is a free-float capitalization-weighted index, and has many symbols, such as, ^GSPC, INX. The Composite Index, as the S&P500 was first called when it introduced its first stock index in 1923, three years later in 1926, the Composite Index expanded to 90 stocks and then in 1957 it expanded to its current 500. Standard & Poors, a company that doles out financial information, in 1941 Poors Publishing merged with Standard Statistics and therein assumed the name Standard and Poors Corporation. The S&P500 index in its present form began on March 4,1957, technology has allowed the index to be calculated and disseminated in real time. The S&P500 is widely used as a measure of the level of stock prices. In September 1962, Ultronic Systems Corp. entered into an agreement with Standard, under the terms of this agreement, Ultronics computed the S&P500 Stock Composite Index, the 425 Stock Industrial Index, the 50 Stock Utility Index, and the 25 Stock Rail Index. Throughout the market day these statistics were furnished to Standard & Poors, in addition, Ultronics also computed and reported the 94 S&P sub-indexes. On August 12,1982, the index closed at 102.42, the index reached a relative intraday high—which was not exceeded for over seven years—of 1,552.87, on March 24,2000, during the dot-com bubble. The index then declined by approximately 50%, to 768.63, on October 10,2002, on May 30,2007, the S&P500 closed at 1,530.23, to set its first all-time closing high in more than seven years. Less than a later, it dropped to 1,400. In mid-2007, the mortgage crisis spread to the wider U. S. financial sector. On November 20,2008, the index closed at 752.44, a modest recovery the following day still left the index down 45. 5% for the year. This year-to-date loss was the greatest since 1931, when the market declined more than 50%. The index closed the year at 903.25, for a loss of 38. 5%, the market continued to decline in early 2009, surrounding the financial crisis of 2008
27.
Day trading
–
Day trading is speculation in securities, specifically buying and selling financial instruments within the same trading day. Strictly, day trading is trading only within a day, such that all positions are closed before the market closes for the trading day, many traders may not be so strict or may have day trading as one component of an overall strategy. Traders who participate in day trading are called day traders, traders who trade in this capacity with the motive of profit are therefore speculators. The methods of quick trading contrast with the long-term trades underlying buy and hold, day trading was once an activity that was exclusive to financial firms and professional speculators. Many day traders are bank or investment firm employees working as specialists in equity investment, however, with the advent of electronic trading and margin trading, day trading is available to private individuals. Some day traders use a technique known as scalping that usually has the trader holding a position for a few minutes or even seconds. Most day traders exit positions before the market closes to avoid unmanageable risks—negative price gaps between one days close and the days price at the open. Other traders believe they should let the profits run, so it is acceptable to stay with a position after the market closes, day traders sometimes borrow money to trade. Since margin interests are typically only charged on overnight balances, the trader may pay no fees for the margin benefit, the margin interest rate is usually based on the brokers call. Because of the profits that day trading makes possible, these traders are sometimes portrayed as bandits or gamblers by other investors. The common use of buying on margin amplifies gains and losses, in addition, brokers usually allow bigger margins for day traders. This means a day trader with the legal minimum $25,000 in his or her account can buy $100,000 worth of stock during the day, originally, the most important U. S. stocks were traded on the New York Stock Exchange. A trader would contact a stockbroker, who would relay the order to a specialist on the floor of the NYSE and these specialists would each make markets in only a handful of stocks. Brokerage commissions were fixed at 1% of the amount of the trade, i. e. to purchase $10,000 worth of stock cost the buyer $100 in commissions and same 1% to sell. One of the first steps to make day trading of shares potentially profitable was the change in the commission scheme, in 1975, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission made fixed commission rates illegal, giving rise to discount brokers offering much reduced commission rates. This activity was identical to modern day trading, but for the duration of the settlement period. But today, to market risk, the settlement period is typically three working days. Reducing the settlement period reduces the likelihood of default, but was impossible before the advent of electronic ownership transfer, the systems by which stocks are traded have also evolved, the second half of the twentieth century having seen the advent of electronic communication networks
28.
News media
–
The news media or news industry are those elements of the mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public. These include print media, broadcast news, and more recently the Internet, a medium is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects, a medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both. The industries which produce news and entertainment content for the media are often called the media. In the late 20th century it became commonplace for this usage to be construed as singular rather than as the traditional plural, broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video signals to a number of recipients that belong to a large group. This group may be the public in general, or a large audience within the public. Thus, an Internet channel may distribute text or music worldwide, the sequencing of content in a broadcast is called a schedule. Television and radio programs are distributed through radio broadcasting or cable, by coding signals and having decoding equipment in homes, the latter also enables subscription-based channels and pay-per-view services. A broadcasting organization may broadcast several programs at the time, through several channels, for example BBC One. On the other hand, two or more organizations may share a channel and each use it during a part of the day. Digital radio and digital television may also transmit multiplexed programming, with several channels compressed into one ensemble, when broadcasting is done via the Internet the term webcasting is often used. Broadcasting forms a large segment of the mass media. Broadcasting to a narrow range of audience is called narrowcasting. In a broadcast system, journalists or reporters are also involved editing the video material that has been shot alongside their research. Broadcast journalists often make an appearance in the story at the beginning or end of the video clip. In television or broadcast journalism, news analysts examine, interpret, anchors present this as news, either videotaped or live, through transmissions from on-the-scene reporters. News films can vary in length, there are some which may be as long as ten minutes, others that need to fit in all the relevant information and material in two or three minutes. News channels these days have begun to host special documentary films that stretch for much longer durations and are able to explore a news subject or issue in greater detail
29.
The Wall Street Journal
–
The Wall Street Journal is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, the newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Journal had a circulation of about 2.4 million copies as of March 2013, compared with USA Todays 1.7 million. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes through 2015 and derives its name from Wall Street in the heart of the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8,1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, the Journal also publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ. They were later aggregated in a daily summary called the Customers Afternoon Letter. In 1896, The Dow Jones Industrial Average was officially launched and it was the first of several indices of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1899, the Journals Review & Outlook column, which still today, appeared for the first time. Journalist Clarence Barron purchased control of the company for US$130,000 in 1902, circulation was then around 7,000, Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting—a novelty in the early days of business journalism. In 1921, Barrons, Americas premier financial weekly, was founded, Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly affected the Great Depression in the United States. Barrons descendants, the Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007, the Journal took its modern shape and prominence in the 1940s, a time of industrial expansion for the United States and its financial institutions in New York. Bernard Kilgore was named managing editor of the paper in 1941, under Kilgore, in 1947, that the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, for William Henry Grimess editorials. In 1970, Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, which at the time comprised nine dailies, later, the name was changed to Dow Jones Local Media Group. In 2007 News Corp. acquired Dow Jones, a luxury lifestyle magazine, was launched in 2008. A complement to the print newspaper, The Wall Street Journal Online, was launched in 1996, in 2003, Dow Jones began to integrate reporting of the Journals print and online subscribers together in Audit Bureau of Circulations statements. In 2007, it was believed to be the largest paid-subscription news site on the Web. Since then, online subscribership has fallen, due in part to rising subscription costs, in May 2008, an annual subscription to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $119 for those who do not have subscriptions to the print edition. By June 2013, the monthly cost for a subscription to the edition was $22.99, or $275.88 annually
30.
CNBC
–
CNBC is an American basic cable, internet and satellite business news television channel that is owned by NBCUniversal News Group, a division of NBCUniversal, owned by Comcast. As of February 2015, CNBC is available to approximately 93,623,000 pay television households in the United States, in 2007, the network was ranked as the 19th most valuable cable channel in the United States, worth roughly $4 billion. In addition to the domestic U. S. feed, various localized versions of CNBC also operate, serving different regions, NBCUniversal is the owner, or a minority stakeholder, in many of these versions. CNBC had its beginnings around 1980 as the Satellite Program Network, showing a mix of old movies, instructional. The channel later changed its name to Tempo Television, after initially signing a letter of intent to acquire Tempo, NBC eventually opted for a deal to lease the channels transponder in June 1988. On this platform, and under the guidance of Tom Rogers, NBC and Cablevision initially operated CNBC as a 50-50 joint venture, choosing to headquarter the channel in Fort Lee, New Jersey. CNBC had considerable difficulty getting cable carriage at first, as many providers were skeptical of placing it alongside the longer-established Financial News Network. By the winter of 1990, CNBC was only in 17 million homes – less than half of FNNs potential reach – despite having the muscle of NBC standing behind it, however, around this time, FNN encountered serious financial difficulties. The deal increased the distribution of the enlarged network to over 40 million homes. Cablevision sold its 50% stake to NBC upon completion of the deal, with the full name Consumer News and Business Channel dropped, the networks business programming was at first branded CNBC/FNN, although this was phased out before the mid-1990s. Under Rogers leadership, CNBC began to grow during the 1990s, NBC Universal reacquired full control of loss-making CNBC Europe and CNBC Asia from Dow Jones at the end of 2005. The licensing agreement between Dow and CNBC U. S. remained intact, however, a rolling ticker provides real-time updates on share prices on the NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX, as well as market indices, news summaries, and weather updates by NBC meteorologists. A rotating top band of the screen rotates provides real-time updates on index and commodity prices from world markets. As of January 4,2016, the networks 480i standard definition feed now shows the same 16,9 HD feed on its 4,3 picture, CNBC provides a variety of programs throughout the business day. These short bulletins, which are around 30 seconds in length, the CNBC. com News Now update segments were discontinued as of early 2010. These bulletins were reintroduced in 2015 and they are aired hourly, on the half-hour between 10. 30am and 4. 30pm. The bulletins are read by Sue Herera, CNBCs breakout hit among its original series is Mad Money. Hosted by money manager Jim Cramer, the show gives stock advice to viewers who call to the program
31.
Broadcasting of sports events
–
The broadcasting of sports events is the live coverage of sports as a television program, on radio, and other broadcasting media. It usually involves one or more sports commentators describing the events as they happen, Broadcasting of sports started with descriptions of play sent via telegraph in the 1890s. In 1896, a line was connected to the Victoria Rink in Montreal to update fans in Winnipeg of the Stanley Cup challenge series between Montreal and Winnipeg ice hockey teams. Later that month, the first full-game broadcast took place in Winnipeg and that same season, hockey broadcasting pioneer Foster Hewitt made his first broadcast. In 1933, Hewitt called a Canada-wide radio broadcast of an NHL game between the Detroit Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs, always starting the broadcast with Hello, Canada, and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland. This phrase stuck around all the way to CBCs first national television broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada in October 1952, today it is consistently among the highest-rated programs in Canada. Broadcasting of the Canadian Football League has been a fixture of Canadian television since the CBCs debut in 1952, from 1962 through 2007, there were two separate CFL contracts, one for CBC, and one for CTV. Terrestrial television broadcasts of CFL games ended in 2008, when TSN acquired exclusive TV rights to the league, American sports broadcasts are widely available in Canada, both from Canadian stations and from border blasters in the United States. The first sports event broadcast in the United Kingdom was a Rugby Union international between England and Wales, broadcast from Twickenham in January 1927, two weeks later the first broadcast of a football match took place, with the BBC covering Arsenals league fixture against Sheffield United at Highbury. The United Kingdom saw the first live television broadcast of a football match, the British media is dominated by national outlets, with local media playing a much smaller role. ITV broadcast a smaller portfolio of events, and Channel 4 broadcast a few events from the 1980s, mainly horse races, in the early 1990s this arrangement was shaken up by the arrival of pay-TV in the form of BSkyB. Their dedicated sports channels have become the only place for some major sports to be seen. There is also a dedicated UK version of Eurosport, called British Eurosport, Radio sports coverage is also important. BBC Radio 5 Live broadcasts almost all sports events. BBC Local Radio also provides coverage of sport, giving more exposure to second-tier clubs which get limited national coverage. In the United States, national and local media both serve major roles in sports broadcasting, depending on the league and event, telecasts are often shown live on network television, and nationally available cable channels. Additionally, cable channels also exist that are dedicated to types of sports, certain college sports conferences. Pay-per-view broadcasts are restricted to combat sports such as boxing
32.
Employee stock option
–
An employee stock option is commonly viewed as a complex call option on the common stock of a company, granted by the company to an employee as part of the employees remuneration package. To the extent the position can be modeled as a type of option. Traditional employee stock options have structural problems, in that when exercised followed by a sale of stock. Early exercises also have substantial penalties to the exercising employee and those penalties are a) part of the fair value of the options, called time value is forfeited back to the company and b) an early tax liability occurs. These two penalties overcome the merits of diversifying in most cases, Stock option expensing was a controversy well before the most recent set of controversies in the early 2000s. The controversy continued and in 2005, at the insistence of the SEC, one misunderstanding is that the expense is at the fair value of the options. In addition the fair value measure must be modified for forfeiture estimates, many companies use employee stock options plans to retain and attract employees, the objective being to give employees an incentive to behave in ways that will boost the companys stock price. If the companys stock price rises above the call price. The employee would experience a direct benefit of the difference between the market and the exercise prices. If the market price falls below the exercise price at the time near expiration. Restrictions on the option, such as vesting and non-transferring, attempt to align the holders interest with those of the business shareholders, another substantial reason that companies issue employee stock options as compensation is to preserve and generate cash flow. The cash flow comes when the company issues new shares and receives the exercise price, Employee stock options are mostly offered to management as part of their executive compensation package. They may also be offered to non-executive level staff, especially by businesses that are not yet profitable, alternatively, employee-type stock options can be offered to non-employees, suppliers, consultants, lawyers and promoters for services rendered. Employee stock options are similar to exchange traded call options issued by a company with respect to its own stock, at any time before exercise, employee stock options can be said to have two components, time value and intrinsic value. Any remaining time value component is forfeited back to the company when early exercises are made, most top executives hold their ESOs until near expiration, thereby minimizing the penalties of early exercise. Employee stock options are non-standardized calls that are issued as a contract between the employer and employee. Over the course of employment, a company generally issues ESOs to an employee which can be exercised at a price set on the grant day. At that point, the employee may either sell the stock, or hold on to it in the hope of further price appreciation or hedge the stock position with listed calls and puts
33.
Mark Cuban
–
Mark Cuban is an American businessman, investor, author, television personality, and philanthropist. He is the owner of the NBAs Dallas Mavericks, co-owner of 2929 Entertainment and he is also one of the main shark investors on the ABC reality television series, Shark Tank. In 2011, Cuban wrote an e-book, How to Win at the Sport of Business, in which he chronicles his experiences in business. Mark Cuban was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and his father, Norton Cuban, was an automobile upholsterer, while Cuban has described his mother, Shirley, as someone with a different job or different career goal every other week. He grew up in the suburb of Mount Lebanon, in a Jewish working-class family and his paternal grandfather changed the family name from Chabenisky to Cuban after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island. His maternal grandparents, who were also Jewish, came from Romania, Cubans first step into the business world occurred at age 12, when he sold garbage bags to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. At age 16, Cuban took advantage of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette strike by running newspapers from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, instead of attending high school for his senior year, he enrolled as a full-time student at the University of Pittsburgh where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi International fraternity. While attending the University of Pittsburgh, he held a variety of including a bartender, disco dancing instructor. He chose Indianas Kelley School of Business without even visiting the campus because it had the least expensive tuition of all the schools on the top 10 list. During college he had business ventures, including a bar, disco lessons. In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas, where he first found work as a bartender and he was fired less than a year later, after meeting with a client to procure new business instead of opening the store. Cuban started his own company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software, MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was a proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes. One of the companys largest clients was Perot Systems, in 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe—then a subsidiary of H&R Block—for $6 million. He made approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal, in 1995, Chris Jaeb and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast. com in 1998, by 1999, Broadcast. com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, Broadcast. com helped launch the first live-streamed Victorias Secret Fashion Show and that year, during the dot com boom, Broadcast. com was acquired by Yahoo. for $5.7 billion in Yahoo. stock. After the sale of Broadcast. com, Cuban diversified his wealth to avoid exposure to a market crash, in 2011, Cuban was No.211 on Forbes list of Worlds Richest People, with a net worth of $2.6 billion
34.
Hedge (finance)
–
A hedge is an investment position intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment. In simple language, a hedge is used to any substantial losses or gains suffered by an individual or an organization. Hedging is the practice of taking a position in one market to offset, the word hedge is from Old English hecg, originally any fence, living or artificial. The use of the word as a verb in the sense of dodge, evade is first recorded in the 1590s, a typical hedger might be a commercial farmer. The market values of wheat and other crops fluctuate constantly as supply and demand for them vary, with occasional large moves in either direction. Based on current prices and forecast levels at harvest time, the farmer might decide that planting wheat is a good idea one season, once the farmer plants wheat, he is committed to it for an entire growing season. Due to the uncertainty of supply and demand fluctuations. One such transaction is the use of forward contracts, forward contracts are mutual agreements to deliver a certain amount of a commodity at a certain date for a specified price and each contract is unique to the buyer and seller. For this example, the farmer can sell a number of forward contracts equivalent to the amount of wheat he expects to harvest, once the forward contracts expire, the farmer will harvest the wheat and deliver it to the buyer at the price agreed to in the forward contract. Therefore, the farmer has reduced his risks to fluctuations in the market of wheat because he has already guaranteed a number of bushels for a certain price. However, there are many risks associated with this type of hedge. For example, if the farmer has a low yield year and he harvests less than the amount specified in the forward contracts, he must purchase the bushels elsewhere in order to fill the contract. This becomes even more of a problem when the lower yields affect the entire wheat industry and the price of wheat increases due to supply and demand pressures. Also, while the farmer hedged all of the risks of a price decrease away by locking in the price with a forward contract, another risk associated with the forward contract is the risk of default or renegotiation. The forward contract locks in an amount and price at a certain future date. Because of that, there is always the possibility that the buyer will not pay the amount required at the end of the contract or that the buyer will try to renegotiate the contract before it expires. Future contracts are another way our farmer can hedge his risk without a few of the risks that forward contracts have, future contracts are similar to forward contracts except they are more standardized. These contracts trade on exchanges and are guaranteed through clearinghouses, clearinghouses ensure that every contract is honored and they take the opposite side of every contract
35.
Network effect
–
In economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it, the classic example is the telephone. The more people who own telephones, the valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase a telephone without intending to create value for other users, Online social networks work in the same way, with sites like Twitter and Facebook becoming more attractive as more users join. The expression network effect is applied most commonly to positive network externalities as in the case of the telephone, negative network externalities can also occur, where more users make a product less valuable, but are more commonly referred to as congestion. Over time, positive effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable. Network effects were a theme in the arguments of Theodore Vail. In 1908, when he presented the concept in Bells annual report, there were over 4,000 local and regional telephone exchanges, most of which were eventually merged into the Bell System. The economic theory of the effect was advanced significantly between 1985 and 1995 by researchers Michael L. Katz, Carl Shapiro, Joseph Farrell. Network effects were popularized by Robert Metcalfe, stated as Metcalfes law, Metcalfe was one of the co-inventors of Ethernet and a co-founder of the company 3Com. In selling the product, Metcalfe argued that customers needed Ethernet cards to grow above a critical mass if they were to reap the benefits of their network. This was expressed algebraically as having a cost of N, Network effects become significant after a certain subscription percentage has been achieved, called critical mass. At the critical point, the value obtained from the good or service is greater than or equal to the price paid for the good or service. A key business concern must then be how to attract users prior to reaching critical mass, one way is to rely on extrinsic motivation, such as a payment, a fee waiver, or a request for friends to sign up. A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects, then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base. Beyond critical mass, the number of subscribers generally cannot continue indefinitely. After a certain point, most networks become either congested or saturated, the applicable analogy is that of a telephone network. While the number of users is below the point, each additional user adds additional value to every other customer
36.
New economy
–
The new economy is the result of the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This particular use of the term was popular during the bubble of the late 1990s. The high growth, low inflation and high employment of this led to overly optimistic predictions. A1983 cover article in Time magazine, The New Economy, by 1997, Newsweek was referring to the new economy in many of its articles. After a nearly 25-year period of unprecedented growth, the United States experienced a much discussed economic slowdown beginning in 1972, however, around 1995, U. S. economic growth accelerated, driven by faster productivity growth. From 1972 to 1995, the rate of output per hour. But by the mid 1990s, growth became much faster,2.65 percent from 1995–99, america also experienced increased employment and decreasing inflation. His method relied on applying considerably sized gains in the cycle to explain aggregate productivity growth. According to another point of view, the new economy is a current Kondratiev wave which will end after a 50-year period in the 2040s and its innovative basis includes Internet, nanotechnologies, telematics and bionics. In the financial markets, the term has associated with the Dot-com bubble. In the wider economy the term has associated with practices such as outsourcing, business process outsourcing. At the same time, there was a lot of investment in the companies of the technology sector, a lot of start-ups were created and the stock value was very high where floated. Newspapers and business leaders were starting to talk of new business models, some even claimed that the old laws of economics did not apply anymore and that new laws had taken their place. They also claimed that the improvements in hardware and software would dramatically change the future. Some, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Blake Belding, have suggested that a lot of investment in technology, especially in software. However, this may be too harsh a judgment, given that U. S. investment in technology has remained relatively strong since 2002. While there may have been some overinvestment, productivity research shows that much of the investment has been useful in raising output, the recession of 2001, disproved many of the more extreme predictions made during the boom years, and gave credence to Gordons minimization of computers contributions. However, subsequent research suggests that productivity growth has been stimulated by heavy investment in information and communication technology
