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Besides senior management considerations, it is helpful for you to understand what VCs and Business Angels expect by way of return on their investment. VCs will be looking for a high return and a likely exit in five to seven years. They are attracted to businesses that have a chance of going public, or being on-sold at a significant profit. (You need to bear in mind, however, that very few private businesses have a realistic chance of taking the flotation route.)
Business Angels are a mixed bag of individuals. Some of them take a professional investment approach by seeking high returns through a three to five year exit (and will keep at arm’s length from your business in the meantime). Others will be quite happy to be involved in the business in a non-executive capacity with no particular rate of return, or exit time frame in mind: these people might be, simply, looking for something exciting to do!
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The developments in credit markets since 2000 have shown that a disciplined approach to minimize risk is necessary. This includes the determination of stop-loss marks which have to be defined on a caseby- case basis. Important is the volatility of the particular bond and the risk profile of the portfolio. Aportfolio with a high-yield benchmark will be able
to take the highest volatility but a buy-and-hold strategy is also not compatiblefor such a portfolio if a specific bond has to suffer a huge price loss.
The price mechanism of Fallen Angels and high-yield bonds requires disciplined stop loss marks. Fallen Angels tend to trade on very wide levels prior to a downgrade in high yield but a downgrade will usually induce another sell-off in the bonds so that a significant price fall will occur.
Besides fundamental facts, technical factors play an important role and current risk appetite of investors determines basically a floor for the Fallen Angel. If new buyers arise upswings in price can be significant, supported through positive credit news.
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Web standards allow you to increase the searchability of your financial sites. Google has been dubbed the greatest blind user out there on the web, because it (as well as other search engines) are particularly partial to indexing standards-compliant sites.
Break the “build, break, re-build” cycle. It is important to ensure forward compatibility of every website regardless if it concerns loans, real estate or money in general, with any new browser releases: your CSS-based financial site will be displayed accurately in future versions of today browsers. With table-based sites you never know what may happen. Along with the constant evolution of (standards compliant) browsers the performance of non-standards sites decreases. This phenomen is often described as “perpetual obsolescence”.
You can also save money by simplifying your design requirements. Compliant financial websites have an improved chance of rendering properly on all resolution and monitor sizes, while still maintaining design integrity that was originally intended for them.
Not only can you improve your income but also accquire some good publicity along the way. Creating an attractive, well-functioning and standards-compliant financial website is becoming the benchmark of good design and development of a successful company.
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Web standards are frequently described as being profitable only to various types of people with disabilities. Although helping this group is a crucial element of the standards rationale, there is a great number of other reasons why standards-based finacial websites are a mark of the future of online money making pages, not the least of which is the way they affect your bottom line and income. In the financial sector with sites concerning loans, real estate or forex trading, it is in most cases about saving some of your money. Because of that financial sites such as ESPN have got rid of all layout tables and decided on structural markup and CSS-driven layout (and saved as much as 3 terabytes of bandwidth a day) instead. The same drivers are true in case of government.
It is important to cut your financial expenses. Standard compliant websites are in many cases less expensive to maintain, develop and run. Consequently your pages are able to be much lighter, reducing load costs in the process. There are no tables or framesets that need to be deciphered down the track – older table-based sites are especially inflexible (and expensive to keep) to any updates. As a result, your longevity improves. You also should avoid various costs of producing code forking, spacer pixels, deeply nested tables and various propriety hacks.
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The fact that your financial website is rendering just fine on all current browsers is no guarantee that a business site that contains invalid markup will as render fine in the future. What is more, there are no guarantee that your website will be displayed fine (or at all) in the constantly increasing number of non-traditional devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. As companies involved in the browser business make further efforts to make their products compliant to web standards, the issue of “rendering fine” in specific browsers becomes moot, anyway. Standards-compliant markup your financial website will be even more of an assurance that it will work properly on every platform in contrast to error-laden and proprietary markup.
Designing your real estate or loans website to the current level of standard indicates your website should be marked up using the so called XHTML – an XML-compatible version of plain old HMTL. If you resort to this format will allow your business to venture into the inevitable world of XML without the necessity for any significant alterations of your financial site’s structure. XML features can be added without much time and effort involved.
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The bonds of Ericsson, Tyco and ABB. All three companies had credit-specific issues in the past and seemed to have overcome those at the time of writing (December, 2003). Their lowest prices were quoted almost at the same time (October, 2002) where risk tolerance reached the lowest level in a decade (measured by VIX). The important point to illustrate is that nonsystematic risks induced the first price falls in all three companies at different points in time. Idiosyncratic risks were responsible for the first massive downward price movement. In this situation, an assessment of the credit should not be based only on credit fundamentals but every credit portfolio manager has to evaluate what volatility his portfolio can sustain because the main task for a high-yield portfolio manager is to manage risk. Technical factors have to be considered because it is likely that market liquidity for a troubled bond will disappear quickly which will result in a “free fall” in price.
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Along with the explosive increase of the Web and flourishing financial websites that deal with a variety of topics such as payday loans, stock exchange, forex and real estate, companies have realized the profits that wait for those eager to build a strong online presence. When they decide to publish a financial website on the Internet, companies are able to build their brand, market their products, support any existing customers, release publicity pieces, and even take orders. However, very often lost in the fast pace of growth has been an eye on the influence that their current web-building business will exert on the bottom line and the perspectives of their online presence. Remember that not only does your website financial content have a significant influence on your company’s income but so does the way your website itself is created.
Preparing your site with necessary commitment to web standards – and continuously testing to ensure it keeps constant compliance to those standards – can save your business much money and possibly increase income generated by your website.
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Designing your financial website with conformance to current standards means that – by proxy – the documents will be smaller. As a result, the pages will be displayed much faster for the users seeking data on latest currency values and loans interest. Moreover, download times have proven to be an important factor in usability of financial websites. Users often look for latest financial information (for example from stock exchange) and any perceivable delay will harm the evaluation of your website. Users tend to rate sites with slow financial data display as less interesting and offering lower quality content. Additionally, they claim that delays tend to severely interfere with task continuity, their ability to remember financial details from your site, and use flow. Really slow display of stock market information can lead users to believe some kind of error has occurred. Finally, users correlate site performance and security: financial sites that are constantly slow are considered to be less secure resources, and this is extremely important if you deal with matters such as banking, loans or forex.
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There are some advisable practices that allow you to obtain a more flexible and reasoned approach to developing a financial website. This approach to financial content is based on standards devised by organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These involve various concepts (that deal not only with money, loans and real estate), yet they all share the crucial idea of proper separation of presentation of financial data from structured content and from the behavior level of the user interface. These three levels are all potentially interconnected to the backend software running your financial website when they should not be. Modern, W3C standards advise the implementation of the three levels as follows, encompassing structured content, presentation, and behavior:
Structured Financial Content should involve valid HTML or XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) in order to mark up your content and forms (for example loan application forms). Such markup needs to be semantically built and entirely devoid of any presentation or behavior data.
Presentation of financial data should involve the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Style sheets contain all necessary presentation information for all your financial websites and applications. This presentation layer should never be incorporated directly in your CMS or application logic with the exception of references to the files, classes, and IDs.
Behavior: usually JavaScript (aka ECMAScript). Modern JavaScript has the ability to be implemented in an unobtrusive manner, using only external files and the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) instead of any kind of proprietary code. Moreover, it never contains any references to presentation of financial data directly, but instead gets and sets classes which point back to the CSS. While connected with the CMS or application layers of your money management software, no JavaScript should ever be inline or intermingled with this code directly.
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Currently Internet witnesses increased complexity around content management systems, accessibility, rich internet applications (RIAs), mobile, application frameworks, syndication, and other multiuse channels, each of which may require to display the presentation of financial information – or a lack of any presentation information – associated with it. In the face of this requirement, most off-the-shelf software packages are damaged by terrible UI practices, not to mention financial and money management software created individually by developers who don’t know any better. Starting with substandard WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors in many popular content management system (often used to display financial data about loans or currency values) to server-side frameworks that create code for users, the UI problems are present in all places.
The good news is that a great deal of current UI issues are almost as fixable as they are pervasive. Although the majority of people involved in the industry believe them to be inherent to Web development, the reality is that they are stubborn relics of bad practices from the 1990s that have persisted into this decade.
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