It is entirely possible that I was too optimistic. For once. What I said was: Our house prices will decline further but (political meltdown excepted) I’d bet serious money that we won’t see these declines in 2009 or 2010. I was talking about the 12.4% decline in US house prices in 2008 and the areas…
From FT.com Official data showed the UK economy contracted 1.5 per cent in the last three months of 2008, the biggest quarterly slump in 28 years. The figures confirmed that Britain had entered its first recession since 1991. The figures, a preliminary official estimate of output, showed a contraction in services, manufacturing and construction. But…
What do the names Oneway, Bull, Kansvatter, Inthemoney, The Bull! and Millionaire in the making have in common? They’re all optimistic, aggressive names used in the Make A Million competition. They’re also, as of right now, all in the bottom ten out of nearly 300 entrants and have all lost everything but a few rand…
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an unfortunately necessary part of driving traffic to discover a website. Good content is necessary but not sufficient. Why SEO is necessary A large percentage of web traffic is directed by search engines. After all, this is how Google has become the giant company that it is. I tried to…
I gave a presentation on a holistic approach to ratemaking using predictive models yesterday to the Lebanese Insurance Association (ACAL, the acronym for the association in French). Over a hundred people attended, and there certainly seemed to be interest in the topic. A common response though was that Lebanon isn’t yet ready for that, because…
[There is an additional post for the 2010 competition on how to not lose money in the make a million competition.] The Make a Million competition is in its fourth year. The aim? Take a personal investment of R10,000 and compete with other “investors” to earn the highest return over a short period of a…
Would you lend money to Country Foods Limited? According to the Z score perhaps you should have participated in the listing in October 2007. Based on their prospectus and audited financial results for the year to September 2007, their Z-score was high within the grey zone, within reach of the coveted “safe zone”. As recently…
I attended workshop presented by the famous credit analyst and model builder, Professor Edward Altman. He is probably most famous for the invention of the seemingly immortal Z score, which is still in use 40 years after its creation in 1968. During the workshop, Professor Altman recounted a story about how a company managed themselves…
