Your Questions About Direct Marketing News

Jere answers:

Not many people understand what Wall Street does. Most books one can read on “stocks” are not that relevant. Think about it — did any of those books suggest anything akin to people shouting in the trading pits?

In terms of equities (“stocks”) and the kind of thing you would see on TV, there are pretty much four big categories.

1) Retail brokers. These are the guys dialing up grandmothers to deal stocks. I don’t think this is what you had in mind, even though a lot of big firms have broad retail distribution networks (Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, etc). Imagine a guy in a cheap suit sitting in a small office with a phone.

2) Institutional sales and trading. The salespeople are guys who are trying to sell brokerage services to pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, and so forth. Imagine well-spoken business suits flying around meeting clients, carrying business cards that say “Goldman Sachs” or “Lehman Brothers”. There are traders behind the scenes of these salespeople responsible for executing orders, and typically it’s really just a game of buying some equities here, holding it for a while, selling some there, etc. The trick is not to make money through growth of the stock, but really to get a little cut in the middle.

3) Exchange traders. Equities, unlike fixed-income products, trade on organized exchanges. The NYSE is one of them. The electronic NASDAQ is another. These guys broker stocks from large buyers and sellers, not unlike the institutional sales and trading people. Except these guys have to sit in small cramped spaces on the exchange and deal much more quickly. You know how these guys are — they’re the ones on the news.

4) Various forms of buy-side traders. These guys trade to make money for their own accounts. Buying low, selling high. Hopefully. They can be in hedge funds, some mutual funds, investment banks, and so forth. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t shout too often, and most of the time the environment is more like a group of online gamers staring at their computer screens.

Now in addition to those guys, there are a lot of other stuff that goes on…

1) Investment bankers, in relevance to traders, do IPOs and then have the institutional salespeople go sell them. Sometimes, that also trickles down to the retail brokers.

2) Research analysts produce reports on stocks.

3) Modelers try to come up with new products, better model existing products, etc. These are derivative-linked things that is actually a whole world onto itself (like equity options).

Then there are a bunch of other guys who do other strange things —

There are, for example, “direct-access” trader companies who are basically guys trying to wring money out of the market by dabbling in it. Some of them use technology, others try to use other techniques. I don’t know how well they do.

Then there are so-called financial planners, etc, they are really just retail brokers.

Getting into the institutional side of things as well as the major buy-side activities is hard. Hard not as in difficult to figure out, but rather hard as in there is no definite way to do it. Some kids who smoke pot all through college taking basket-weaving courses for credit manage to get in smoothly while that hard-core finance major who trades paid for college with his own hedge fund can’t get in no matter how hard he knocks.

Jere answers:

Some Good news for foreign investor check the bellow info

Foreign Investment Policy:
The Ministry of Industry has expanded the list of industries eligible for automatic approval of foreign investments and, in certain cases, raised the upper level of foreign ownership from 51 percent to 74 percent and further in certain cases to 100 percent. In January 1998, the RBI announced simplified procedures for automatic FDI approvals. The announcement further provided that Indian companies will no longer require prior clearances from the RBI for inward remittances of foreign exchange or for the issuance of shares to foreign investors.

Facilitating foreign investment
In the recent budget, the finance minister announced the government’s commitment to a 90-day period for approving all foreign investments. Government officers will be assigned to larger foreign investment proposals and will facilitate Central and State clearances in a time-bound manner. Unlisted companies with a good 3 year track record, have been permitted to raise funds in international markets through the issue of Global Depository Receipts (GDRs) and American Depository Receipts (ADRs).

A number of recent policy changes have reduced the discriminatory bias against foreign firms.

* The government has amended exchange control regulations previously applicable to companies with significant foreign participation.
* The ban against using foreign brand names/trademarks has been lifted.
* The FY 1994/95 budget reduced the corporate tax rate for foreign companies from 65 percent to 55 percent. The tax rate for domestic companies was lowered to 40 percent.
* The long-term capital gains rate for foreign companies was lowered to 20 percent; a 30 percent rate applies to domestic companies.
* The Indian Income Tax Act exempts export earnings from corporate income tax for both Indian and foreign firms.

Other policy changes have been introduced to encourage foreign direct and foreign institutional investment.

For instance, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) recently formulated guidelines to facilitate the operations of foreign brokers in India on behalf of registered Foreign Institutional Investors (FII’s). These brokers can now open foreign currency-denominated or rupee accounts for crediting inward remittances, commissions and brokerage fees.

Relaxation
The condition of dividend balancing (offsetting the outflow of foreign exchange for dividend payments against export earnings) has been eliminated for all but 22 consumer goods industries. A 5-year tax holiday is extended to enterprises engaged in development of infrastructural facilities. Even without a registered office in India, foreign companies are allowed to start multimodal transport services in India.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) now permits 100 percent foreign investment in the construction of roads/bridges. The peak custom duty rate was reduced to 50 percent from 65 percent in the March 1995 budget. Import regime changes included enhancement of the scope of Special Import License (SIL) programs, and the expansion of freely importable items on the Open General License (OGL) list to include some consumer goods.

Dispute Settlement
Currently, there are no investment disputes over expropriation or nationalization. Government demands for penalty payments for alleged overcharging by pharmaceutical companies during the 1980’s could lead to de-facto expropriation of some foreign drug companies’ assets in India.

In pharmaceutical sector
A committee has been named to study these longstanding disputes, but the failure of successive governments to produce a swift and transparent resolution has led to a virtual standstill in foreign investment in India’s pharmaceutical sector. Indian courts provide adequate safeguards for the enforcement of property and contractual rights.

Case backlogs
However, case backlogs frequently lead to long procedural delays. India is not a member of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, nor of the New York Convention of 1958. Commercial arbitration or other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods are not yet popular ways of commercial dispute settlement in India. The recent introduction in Parliament of a new Arbitration Bill signals the importance now accorded to this matter by the GOI.

To know more about investment logon to www.financegogle.com

Jere answers:

I have found this website helpful once before.

Http://www.wd.gc.ca/eng/56.asp

Hope it can help you too

Hector Montalvo
Source Marketing Direct
http://www.sourcemarketingdirectnews.com/

Jere answers:

You can rent a Bloomberg terminal for $1,500/mo and be in direct competition with the market professionals in highly volatile, unpredictable markets.

Do you really want to trade when price is moving wildly up AND down? Trading the news looks like it would be easy in hindsight, but is extremely high risk and unpredictable. Do you have a trading plan for this? Have you tested it? Normal stop levels don’t work, option implied volatility expands to extreme levels, support and resistance are almost meaningless in the ultra short-term volatility of emotional reaction. Momentum has no meaning. What tools do you propose to use?

CNBC is about as good as it gets for breaking news for free. They report on the big news or game changers that can be traded longer-term, like surprise earnings or war breaking out. But Macy’s was not a surprise so much as lowered expectations. It was a sigh of relief that it wasn’t bad, not a game changing blow-out number. Can you discern the difference in real time, or just in hindsight?

This question is another example of deep newbie insight, which correlates to a wet dream. News is disseminated immediately in price. By the time you get public information, the trade is over.

Trading the news is an advanced trading strategy not recommended for newbie traders. Try it on a simulator. You’ll laugh your azz off how silly it is to even try to trade the news. It’s also well documented if you care to research it. The forex market is a good example, almost completely news driven and almost completely impossible to trade unless you have a supercomputer and a team of people at your disposal.
Http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/05/tradingonnews.asp

Jere answers:

All of these companies have multi-level compensation plans (ie MLM). Avon only introduced an MLM component to their operations a few years ago and runs it alongside their single level plan,

Many actual scams trying to disguise themselves by falsely claiming to be legitimate MLM companies, This has led to the unfortunate situation where some legitimate MLM companies use other names to describe there operations to disassociate themselves from the scams.

Direct Selling News provides a list of the Top 100 direct selling companies and their style of compensation plan