CONV.BIZ was formerly a European Convertible Bond website and portal but now in 2009, in its 5th year, it is re-launched and expanded as a CONVENTION OF BUSINESS WEBLINKS.
● AMAZON.CO.UK
CONV.BIZ is an Amazon.co.uk affiliate. You can support CONV.BIZ by bookmarking the page and using the link below when ordering through Amazon.
Updata’s stand-alone and Bloomberg-compatible charting service provides (1) a trading platform for about one-tenth of the cost of Bloomberg (first chart below). It also produces (2) historically-optimised trailing stop-loss signals (unique), especially sensitive momentum charts, credit default swap spread charts (using Bloomberg data), and the immensely-powerful Ichimoku charts, of which an example is in the second chart below. The service is taken by 49 top institutions.
● CLUBS London Capital Club CONV.BIZ uses the London Capital Club for City meetings (and the Sloane Club in Chelsea, which has a reciprocal arrangement with the London Capital Club). See map below.
● CONFERENCES Opalesque.com has extensive details and some special offers on forthcoming events in the world of alternative investments.
● CONSULTANCY SERVICES Hedge Support Impressive services include fund manager set up/FSA authorisation, mid/back office administration, risk reporting and compliance consulting.
CONV. BIZ's prospectus audit library contains dozens of European CB prospectus audits, which detail pros and cons in the prospectuses. Also hundreds of errors and omissions on Bloomberg are logged (some critical). CLICK THE WEBLINK AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE All regulated convertibles and derivatives market participants are required to undergo FSA-mandatory training and taking the CONV.BIZ service may be a way of satisfying FSA requirements, while charging the costs to the training budget.
TrusteeAdvisory's David Norris provides services for legal advisers, trustees, issuers and investors and has worked on audits for fthe CONV.BIZ prospectus audit library. CLICK THE WEBLINK AT THE TO PF THIS PAGE.
● ENGLISH LANGUAGE ONLINE NEWS SERVICES ADVFN.com. is a UK private investor, free-&-fee-based, financial information site. AFX news ticker in English shows a recent stories but only a few. Al-Jazeera can sometimes offer an edge in oil and mining-stock related stories. Opalesque.com’s alternative investment news clippings service is a Cyprus-based, low subscription cost service, used extensively by the hedge fund community.Headlines only are free. There are conference offers and this is the first place to search for conference tickets. The BBC has a Business News site. Bloomberg.com has a limited free service. A full subscriber service starts at around $20,400 p.a. + VAT for a minimum 2-years. and only one user. Good German news coverage in English, and a fantastic help desk. Check prospectus data, if big sums are involved and value hangs on data quality. In 50 prospectus details, CONV.BIZ identified 220 errors in the details descriptions.Bloomberg TV has a gutsy presentation. When the UK service goes to the USA in the afternoon, note that a European service continues in German. The Business’ site is a companion to the paper which is published on Sundays and Mondays The Sunday Times & The Times have a combined website for their business pages. CNBC Europe is a business newswire, and is good on pre-opening breaking news, though content is a little thin. News can be filtered by country. The Financial Times' site is possibly the best financial site, though less is completely free these days. The Guardian’s free search archive contains over 650,000 stories Reuters offers a much improved free website, and provides Breaking News on Reuters
● FOREIGN LANGUAGE NEWS SERVICES The new German-languague website http://www.goyax.de provides coverage of 600,000 financial instuments, details of 35000 funds, with information also on commodities and indicies. Investors can get an inkling as to what is happening to German-listed American shares before the American markets open e.g. see General Motors (http://www.goyax.de/general-motors-Aktieand http://www.goyax.de/general-motors-Chart). Two other services in German are the German Financial News Page of Finanztreff.de and the German 24-hour businessnews ticker from WirtschaftsWoche. La Tribune is a French business newspaper, slightly less encrypted than Les Echos (in French) and is good at picking up broker recommendations. Les Echos is another French business newspaper, with a useful daily alphabetical archive of stories featured (accessible for a small fee). Again, it is in French. Italian News and rumours can be found in Italian on Spystocks.com, part of Finanza.com (owned by Finanza & Mercati). Here is a tip - tap in "convertibili" into the search engine and us the BabelFish translation engine at the bottom of this page.
● GINGER GROUPS ADAM, Mme Colette Neuville’s Rheims-based organisation, devoted to the protection of minority shareholders, although its actions have included Euro Disney and Metrologie Internationale convertibles. The site is in French. The Vigibourse shareholder action contact list is for investors taking individual action in France. The role of the various UK investor protection bodies (to include the NAPF, ABI, PIRC and ISC) are described here. Note that the membership of the ISC includes the NAPF and the ABI, the Unit Trust Association, The Association of Investment Trust Companies, The Asset Management Committee of the British Merchant Banking and Securities Houses Association and the Bank of England in an advisory/observer role.
● HEDGE FUND INDICES & PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT See www.hennesseegroup.com/Indices; these take a while to update after the month-end. See also www.hedgeindex.com, the CSFB/Tremont hedge fund indices, which are probably the most frequently referred to. Compass Analytics’ offers a new, cost-effective performance measurement niche service.
● MOTIVATION & TEAMWORK TALKS Jasper Shackleton built a replica of Captain Bligh's 23 foot open boat in which he and 18 crew members of the Bounty were set adrift, and then with a handful of colleagues retraced the epic voyage through coral reefs across the shark and sea-snake infested Western Pacific to safety. Jasper gives an illustrated talk of this adventure, and discusses the key lessons in terms of motivation and team skills. Contact John Grantham on 01308897935. See also the short clip from the BBC on www.westdorset.org.uk/jaspershackleton. A spectacular team-building exercise is to go out on the "Lizzie Bligh" to Lulworth Coe. Absolutely unforgettable!
● PORTFOLIO ADMINISTRATION The portfolio administration solution from Updata which handles any number of related investment schemes across discretionary, advisory, ISA/PEP and SIPP portfolio products. It handles all aspects of COB compliance removing all the labour intensive aspects of meeting obligations of a firm.
● PROSPECTUSES Perfect Information and Europrospectus.com have different services (and prices). Most investment banks have their own library of prospectuses. Normally one can only get English law trust deeds if one can prove one is a holder, and then the Trustee may impose obstacles such as insisting that the viewing is at the offices of the Trustee, accompanied and with the holder not being allowed to copy or take notes. Absurd. But remember that the Issuer will have an identical copy of the Trust Deed.
● SELLING AND BUYING RECOMMENDATIONS Tipstracker.com’s top chartist David Linton, follows up publicly announced “buy” recommendations to give chart “sell” signals. Broker Tips (Buy and Sell) are collated by Life Style Extra, which also offers access to charts and share prices, if you know the code.
● SOFTWARE SERVICES Bond Price/Yield Calculator for private use, subject to conditions. on downloading. Monis,Sophis, andImagine offer convertibles trading platforms, and more! Worth checking too the likes of Goldman Sachs, UBS and Morgan Stanley as to what they may or may not be able to offer in lieu, the nature of the price feed and the hidden cost of any strings. Also note the independent Derivation’strading platform, which is characterised bysame-day, easy switch-on functionality,robustness in fast markets, a free trial, and installation support.
Numa’s Convertible Bond Calculator A free 1995 on-screen CB calculator from Numa Financial Services. It does not allow for put and call features (see below). Free Options Calculators for Historic Volatility, Implied Volatility, and various other online calculators, though they need the Derivatives Add-in for Excel (A$66 on Visa or Mastercard for private use. Contact Peter Hoadley for details on commercial use). Other functions include an Options Strategy Evaluation tool, Binomial pricing (Cox, Ross & Rubinstein), American and European trinomial pricing and barrier option pricing (all with a graphical tree structure), Black Scholes/binomial convergence analysis and dividend impact analysis. There is also lognormal stock price distribution analysis and a stock price probability calculator (which longhand users might wish to use in association with Numa’s no-call convertibles calculator).
MarketHawk® permits the user to configure his PC to send alerts, chart breakout signals, keyword news stories and detailed messages to his mobile phone or Blackberry/ hand-held device, about (say) the underlying share price movement, or credit defaults swap charts.
● SEARCH ENGINES (BY RELEVANCE & CHRONOLOGICAL)
Dogpile.comsimultaneously searches Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo!, the search being filtered by relevance.CONV.BIZ’ chronologically-filtered Google search engine can pick up less-well-publicised recent items, useful for hunting for new issue information. The trick is to make it RELEVANT as well, by careful choice of the search-words and using the + sign between words! Enter search enquiry and click BOTH search buttons below.
● TRANSLATION ENGINE
Babel Fish The SYSTRAN translation engine of Alta Visa: (Chinese, Dutch, French German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish). Note, too, that on any Google page (such as those provided by the CONV.BIZ chonologically-filtered search engine immediately above) there is a "language tool" link to a translation engine.
Jim Grantham, Joint Editor (with Stuart Wigfall)
INFORMATION: Jim Grantham jimgrantham@fastmail.fm +356 99 160 999 Maltese mobile phone. Skype: robert.james.grantham (c) CONV.BIZ 2009 See Disclaimer.
