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The investment world is never free of a popular new kid on the block; special purpose acquisition companies are attracting significant investor interest as they help companies transition from private to public. Will these shell companies go down in investment history as another short-term craze, or will they become a permanent part of the IPO process? The jury is undecided, but the SPAC is an avenue that investors should consider.

Derivatives carry the potential to drastically increase or drastically decrease initial investments, depending on the underlying assets’ price movements. Derivatives investing is for the experienced investor or the less experienced investor willing to do some research. One advantage is that an investor can get into the action with little expenditure of money but should be prepared to lose some, if not all, of it, should prices swing the wrong way.

Until recently, stock trading was the exclusive domain of high-flying, wealthy Goliaths. With the arrival of avenues such as digital platforms, every-day Davids are entering the arena and, by coordinating their efforts, significantly influencing the prices of targeted stocks. Such was the case of GameStop, with its share price recently experiencing a wild ride after attracting investor interest from different corners, including a band of Davids in Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum.

After slipping precariously in the early days of the pandemic, commodity prices rebounded in the latter months of 2020, in some cases reaching record highs. Continuing the upward climb throughout 2021 depends on a number of factors such as US dollar weakness, economic recovery, supply and demand, monetary policy, fiscal stimulus, weather events and the type of commodity, with oil, base/precious metals and some agricultural products likely leading the charge.

Are you wondering how to invest in 2021, a year that is starting with concerning negatives but also hopeful positives? Although predicting how this year will wind up is difficult, the investor can take steps to make the most of what is guaranteed to be another wild year of ups and downs, including capitalising on inflation surges, capturing cyclical upswings, looking to emerging markets for credit opportunities and harnessing volatility.

On January 27, Tesla released its financial results for the fourth quarter (Q4) 2020 and the full year ended December 31, 2020, confirming that the Palo Alto-based electric-vehicle and clean-energy company’s earnings had missed estimates for the quarter.

Apple reported its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2021 ended December 26, 2020, with a record revenue figure of $111.44 billion—the first time it has exceeded $100 billion in quarterly revenue—and $28.76 billion in profit, making it Apple’s most profitable quarter ever.

Social-media giant Facebook comfortably beat analysts’ estimates across earnings, revenues and active users for the fourth quarter of 2020. “We had a strong end to the year as people and businesses continued to use our services during these challenging times,” explained Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive officer.

In October 2015, the alternative-data company Eagle Alpha published its research on GoPro, the popular action camera company, with much of its findings having been determined by using web-scraping techniques. “The data from US electronics websites pointed to potential weakness in GoPro revenue for the third quarter of that year,” Eagle Alpha noted.

Thanks to key advances being made within the realm of fintech (financial technology), the term democratisation of finance has become perhaps the most important of all from a global-development perspective in recent years. But truth be told, the actual democratisation process can mean different things to different people.