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.
Archive for the ‘economy’ Category
Pervasive bad habits in designing financial websites November 3rd, 2009
In the 1990s, the Browser War that broke out between two financial giants Microsoft and Netscape was a cause of the development of many proprietary technologies and techniques that today have spread across the Internet. A great deal of these technologies involved presentation of various types of information (finances, stock exchange, education, entertainment etc.) into the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) markup or implemented interactivity in a browser-specific way. What is more, developers had to deal with many problems to get a profitable design out of technologies that were not prepared to creating flexible and well-designed websites on subjects such as online loans, banking or real estate. Their numerous kluges and techniques soon became habit, then were incorporated into software, and in the end affected the software industry’s comprehension of how financial websites should be built. Currently, over ten years later, technology and techniques have improved considerably but the specter of those 1990s techniques still remains—and it’s costing everyone a lot of money and potential clients.
Those costs of operating on financial markets online include increased development risk, expenses, and time to market, problems with brand and customer management, unnecessarily high bandwidth costs, staff turnover problems, as well as increased complexity and cost with regard to future financial websites and application of modifications. At the most basic level, these issues are too closely connected with backend software and appear in form of a bloated, technically incorrect and complex code, which does everything from damage the user experience to limit search engine results. Changes in the presentation layer of a financial (or any other) website should not put software at risk and a tiered approach, which has been a popular in the software world for years, is easily accessible by means of a more mature approach on the UI layer.
