Simply mentioning the topic of artificial intelligence in finance usually elicits a mix of excitement (“AI is amazing and can solve every problem”) and fear (“Will we all lose our jobs? Will robots cause the next market crash?”).
Brokerage
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China’s shadow-banking participants, often shady non-bank credit intermediaries, are slowly coming to heel as the government ramps up its efforts to curb leverage in the sector. Once accounting for 87 percent of GDP, the growth of shadow banking’s assets were outstripped by the country’s overall GDP growth during 2017, indicating that China’s financial dragon may finally have been subdued by regulators.
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Next year, investment firms in the European Union will be confronted by a new prudential regime, courtesy of the European Commission, that is so sweeping, it could cause some to rethink what client activities they engage in. Now is the time, for smaller firms, to take a close look at their operations under the light of the regulations and begin to prepare.
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Russia’s economy suffered some major setbacks in recent years, especially as a result of low oil prices, slow growth and sanctions. The country’s equity-market performance slumped in response to the unfavourable macroeconomic and political conditions, but in 2017 it turned upbeat as investors flocked back to take advantage of emerging opportunities, creating an environment conducive to further business growth and prosperity for 2018.
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On 12 June 2017, a blockchain-based company called Bancor raised approximately $153 million in ether (the coin of the cryptocurrency Ethereum) in just less than three hours by way of an initial coin offering (ICO).
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While 2018 may still be in its infancy, the risks hanging over the year’s foreign-exchange (forex) markets have been brewing for some time. An assortment of global hotspots are positioned to affect major currencies and their viability on forex markets.
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Blockchain is moving beyond cryptocurrency exchange into the world’s most progressive stock exchanges, which are optimistic about the technology’s potential to cut cost, enhance speed and reduce risk. Before it revolutionizes stock markets as we know them, the decentralized digital-ledger technology faces a few obstacles, such as scalability and regulation, but those in the know are barely able to contain their excitement about its prospects.
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Active fund management, as its name suggests, involves painstaking and laborious analysis of an investment’s potential in an effort to maximize returns, all of which comes at a cost. In response to that cost, and to active fund managers’ failure to beat the markets, there has been an upsurge of interest in—and stream of cash into—passive investment options.
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On November 21, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe resigned, ending his 37-year rule of the southern African nation. The resignation followed an intervention by the country’s military after Mugabe sacked his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa