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Activist Hedge Funds Aren’t Good for Companies or Investors, So Why Do They Exist?

Harvard Business Review

Activist hedge funds have become capital market and financial media darlings. The Economist famously called them “capitalism’s unlikely heroes” in a cover story, and the FT published an article saying we “should welcome” them. before paying the hedge fund 2% per year plus 20% of that 12.4%

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How Banks Can Compete Against an Army of Fintech Startups

Harvard Business Review

The marketing, underwriting, and servicing of SME loans have largely taken a backseat. New digital entrants have spotted the market opportunity created by these dynamics, and the result is an explosion in online lending to SMEs from fintech startups. Banks’ cost of capital is typically 50 basis points or less.

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Case Study: A Short-Seller Crashes the Party

Harvard Business Review

When the well-known hedge fund manager and short-seller Jeremiah Hughes first put Terranola in the spotlight, issuing ominous warnings about unsold products, a looming patent expiration, and flawed growth projections, the considered judgment of the executive team was to do nothing. “I Terranola’s market cap skyrocketed to $8.1

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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

Back in the ‘60s, people developed the capital asset pricing model [CAPM] as a way to do that. You’d have this beta with the market, so you have the riskless rate plus beta times the equity premium. It’s not something that necessarily resonates a lot with people in the markets or people in the world.

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How Blockchain Is Changing Finance

Harvard Business Review

After all, how do you cut cost from a business or market whose structure has fundamentally changed? By reducing transaction costs among all participants in the economy, blockchain supports models of peer-to-peer mass collaboration that could make many of our existing organizational forms redundant.