News Digest for November 27, 2006

There are 6 items… America’s capital markets: Down on the street | Lifting the Lid: Corporate governance report cards prove tricky | Shareholder equity likely to diminish under new accounting | Artificial intelligence applied heavily to picking stocks | 401(k) teaching in workplace must improve | Podcast numbers show ‘few hooked’

America’s capital markets Down on the street
The loudest sucking sound has been in the market for initial public offerings, a crucial barometer of financial wellbeing. America’s share (measured by proceeds) has collapsed since the late 1990s. Five years ago the New York Stock Exchange dwarfed London and Hong Kong. This year it is being beaten by both.

Lifting the Lid: Corporate governance report cards prove tricky
A wave of business scandals in the past few years has focused much more attention on how companies are run, but even many investor watchdogs don’t exactly agree on how to assess corporate governance.

Shareholder equity likely to diminish under new accounting
The vast majority of public companies will have to revise their balance sheets when they report their fiscal 2006 results. Gordon Latter, a pensions analyst for Merrill Lynch, estimates the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies will lose an aggregate $217 billion in equity — about 6 percent of total equity.

Artificial intelligence applied heavily to picking stocks
Studies estimate that a third of all stock trades in the United States were driven by automatic algorithms last year, contributing to an explosion in stock market activity. Between 1995 and 2005, the average daily volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange increased to 1.6 billion from 346 million.

401(k) teaching in workplace must improve
Much of what poses as 401(k) education in the workplace now has been a failure–sometimes because employees haven’t been motivated to use it, but also because companies have done it on the cheap, or with so many legal constraints, that it’s generic, overwhelming and useless.

Podcast numbers show ‘few hooked’
The survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found 12% of US people online had downloaded a podcast but just 1% of respondents said that they would download a podcast on a typical day.

Please Support Our Work
Email your friends about us. Subscribe to our paid publication Online IR Trends Quarterly. Get us to recommend improvements to your IR website (we're really good at it).