News Digest for August 22, 2006

Here are links to 9 articles … British individual investors pull £6bn out of the market | Applebee’s IRO sets stakeholders’ table | Junk Bond Fees at Record Low | Web 2.0: What on earth is it and should you care? | UK Executive Rewards Fail to Reflect Performance, PwC | Marketing Reality Check: Blogs, Pods, RSS | One Third of Actively Managed U.S. Mutual Funds Are ”Closet Indexers” | Strategy should start in the boardroom | OFRs published by half of UK big businesses

British individual investors pull £6bn out of the market
WARY individual investors deserted the stock market after falls in May, selling an estimated net £6 billion of British shares in June and July.

Applebee’s IRO sets stakeholders’ table
One voter said that when Applebee’s has bad news, it gets it out, doesn’t spin it, and then tells Wall Street what it’s going to do to fix it. “Communication like that spells the difference between ‘renting’ a stock for a few months and becoming a long-term investor,” the voter said.

Junk Bond Fees at Record Low
Today’s fees are little more than a quarter of the 4 percent charged when Milken, now a global philanthropist, developed the market for high-risk, high-yield bonds and turned them into the securities industry’s biggest moneymaker.

Web 2.0: What on earth is it and should you care?
Web 2.0 is one of those phrases which we’re hearing a lot about currently. Everybody says they’re very excited about it but do they really know what it is?

UK Executive Rewards Fail to Reflect Performance, PwC
The effectiveness of some long-term schemes had also been blunted by their complexity because executives did not understand the performance criteria or how they related to their day-to-day work.

Marketing Reality Check: Blogs, Pods, RSS
While marketing prognosticators and technophiles rush into the future, raving about the next big content delivery system or ad model, the fact is most Americans — notably adults with steady incomes — still get their content the old-fashioned way.

Nearly One Third of Actively Managed U.S. Mutual Funds Are ”Closet Indexers” Finds New Study from Yale School of Management
The study confirms the conventional wisdom that smaller funds are more actively managed, while a significant number of large funds, particularly those with more than $1 billion in assets, are closet indexers. Looking at the evolution of active management over time, Petajisto and Cremers also find that closet indexing is a relatively new problem that is on the rise. Prior to the 1990s, most mutual fund assets were truly active; in recent years that fraction has dropped to 20-30%

Strategy should start in the boardroom
We find it strange that corporate boards often have committees devoted to political affairs or technology but no vehicle through which strategy can find its way on to the agenda of every meeting. One solution is to make strategy a formal subset of the regular work of an existing committee, for instance the nominations or governance committee, on which strategically minded directors can sit.

OFRs published by half of UK big businesses
An analysis of 23 FTSE 100 companies by Black Sun, a corporate reporting agency, found 11 produced OFRs that went beyond the basic statutory requirements.

Related posts:

1. SEC greenlights "notice-and-access" news releases
2. SEC survey a reality check on retail investor web use
3. SEC’s new guidance for websites and blogs posted
4. The downside of suing stock analysts
5. SEC to rule soon on websites for Reg. FD

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