Good companies to work for are also good companies to invest in, according to new research by Alex Edman of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In a recent paper, Edmans says there is a direct positive correlation over the long term between employee satisfaction and stock market returns for the companies they work for. In fact, it’s a positive alpha of 4 per cent for his study of 100 companies between 1984 and 2005.

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After many years of extraordinary growth, China has clearly been adversely affected by the global economic recession. Its own economy is slowing rapidly, with declines in exports, property prices, and fixed investment. In response, the Chinese government. strongly motivated to maintain stability, is injecting large doses of fiscal stimulus and making other administrative efforts to revive economic activity.

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Investors need to be aware that rare events with an extreme impact that, afterwards, we think we could have predicted – in short, black swans – happen in the markets. Those who are trying to measure risk in the financial markets need to carefully distinguish risk, with its probabilities, from uncertainty, which cannot be measured. We have become increasingly vulnerable to black swans because our financial economy has come to play an ever-larger role in our productive economy.

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Some proponents of fundamental indexation claim that the strategy is based on a new theory in which market prices of stocks deviate from fair values. A key assumption in this approach is that fundamental weights are unbiased estimators of fair value weights that are statistically independent of market values. This article demonstrates that, except in trivial cases, this assumption is internally inconsistent because the sources of the ‘errors’ are also determinants of market values.

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