The Star Online: Business
The Star Online: Business |
- Maybank drives KLCI higher in early trade
- U.S. economists win Nobel for applying match-making
- New UK market watchdog to spell out approach to industry
| Maybank drives KLCI higher in early trade Posted: 15 Oct 2012 07:07 PM PDT KUALA LUMPUR: Blue chips edged up in early trade on Tuesday, lifted by gains in Maybank, in line with the regional markets as sentiment was given by a mild boost from the firmer overnight close on Wall Street. At 9.31am, the FBM KLCI was up 1.98 points to 1,656.42. Turnover was 137.90 million shares valued at RM74.46mil. There were 145 gainers, 99 losers and 165 counters unchanged. Bloomberg reported Asian stocks rose, with the regional benchmark index headed for a second-day of gains, as exporters advanced after the US reported better-than-expected retail sales. Maybank KE Research said in its technical report that while the KLCI climbed 1.08 points to 1,654.44 on Monday, the resistance level of 1,656 and 1,668 may cap market gains, whilst obvious support areas are located at 1,639 and 1,654. It said the KLCI index established a previous all-time high of 1,655.49 on Sept 3, 2012 and reached a key swing low of 1,595.85 (Sept 24). "Selling from the current levels to the KLCI's all time high of 1,668.32 may bring about some profit-taking. Volatility and weakness may emerge at the current lofty levels or near the index's upside target of 1,683. Some accumulation near its support areas might be wise, in view the DJIA's overnight rise," it said. Maybank rose 20 sen to RM9.14 while Petronas GAS gained 16 sen to Rm19.98 and Tradewinfs 13 sen to RM6.53 while MAHB gained six sen to RM5.90. Tasek was the top gainer, up 78 sen to Rm12.28. BAT 24 sen to RM62.56 and Genting Plantations 10 sen to RM9 while Pharmaniaga edged up eight sen to RM8.38. Profit taking saw Dutch Lady shedding 20 sen to RM49 while CIMB and Golsta lost five sen each to RM7.61 and RM1.21 and HLFG lower by four sen to RM12.20. |
| U.S. economists win Nobel for applying match-making Posted: 15 Oct 2012 06:39 PM PDT STOCKHOLM: Life-saving kidney exchanges and ways for schools to select students are just two practical applications of the market-matching theories for which U.S. economists Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel prize for economics on Monday. Pairing up employers with job seekers - for instance doctors and lawyers taking up their first appointments - are other examples of how Roth, 60, and Shapley, 89, have separately applied game theory to daily life. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the 8 million crown ($1.2 million) prize, called their work an outstanding example of economic engineering. Roth and other economists who study market design are exploring how matching procedures can be improved to produce better results for all concerned. Speaking to Reuters from California, Roth gave the example of Stanford, his alma mater, to which he recently returned after a long spell at Harvard. Stanford competes for students with the likes of Harvard and Princeton, and who applies and is admitted does not depend solely on price. Stanford keeps its tuition costs low enough to attract plenty of applicants and selects among them. "So there is choice going on, on both sides. It's a little like getting married. Taking a job is like this too," Roth said. "And it turns out that, to some extent, getting an organ for transplantation is a little like it. So there are a lot of things that you get in life that you can't just choose. You also have to be chosen. And that's what we study. We study matching." MATCHING MARKETS, SAVING LIVES Roth, in a series of empirical studies, built on separate work done much earlier by Shapley, an emeritus professor at the University of California Los Angeles, who had used game theory to compare various matching methods and make sure the matches were acceptable to all counterparts. Roth seized on a 1962 study by Shapely and David Gale, now deceased, that proved the "possibility of making stable matchings between men and women so no one wants to run off with another partner," as Jonathan Levin, dean of the economics department at Stanford, put it on Monday. Roth, who was sleeping when Stockholm telephoned and missed the first call to inform him of his prize, described his work as studying "courtship" of many kinds. "You can't just have what you want; you also have to do some courtship and there is courtship on both sides and we study the marketplace processes by which those types of courtship are resolved." Roth explained later at a news conference in Stanford that algorithms, the formulas used to resolve a problem, help organize and process people's preferences. "But the things that go into those preferences, we often have very little to say about that, and that's where hunches come in," he said. The economics prize, officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established by Sweden's central bank in 1968. It was not part of the original group of awards, for sciences and promoting peace, that was set out in the 1895 will of Nobel, who invented dynamite. "This is very much what economics is about," said Tore Ellingsen, a Nobel committee member and a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. "How to allocate scarce resources as well as possible, to economise." Roth has applied market design theory to the public schools admissions process in New York and Boston. He is also a co-founder of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, www.nepke.org, which draws on his work on matching markets to bring together pairs of compatible kidney donors and recipients. "Here is an economic theorist who hasn't just made things more efficient. He has actually saved lives. It is unclear whether it is the economics Nobel he deserved or the Nobel prize for medicine," Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto, wrote on www.digitopoly.org. - Reuters |
| New UK market watchdog to spell out approach to industry Posted: 15 Oct 2012 06:37 PM PDT LONDON: Britain's new market watchdog will spell out on Tuesday how its sharper teeth to ban products and challenge business models should make the 26,000 firms it will supervise think twice about ripping off consumers again. Martin Wheatley, the head of the Financial Conduct Authority being launched in early 2013, will tell a Thomson Reuters event at 9:00 a.m. British time how powers to take harmful products off the market would work in practice. "We will make the intervention first and then we will carry out the consultation and the cost/benefit analysis," Wheatley told an industry event last week. The new approach aims to draw a line under 20 years of mis-selling in Britain and make sure consumers are offered products that are suited to their needs. The cost to banks of compensating people mis-sold loan protection insurance alone will top 10 billion pounds. The FCA will take on the conduct, enforcement and consumer protection operations of the Financial Services Authority when the unitary supervisor is scrapped early next year. The FSA's broader supervisory powers over banks and insurers will be handed to a new unit at the Bank. This "twin peaks" set-up seeks to increase the intensity of supervision which was found wanting ahead of the financial crisis. The dual regulatory approach has already been introduced on a "virtual" basis by splitting up the FSA staff into conduct and prudential units ahead of a formal switchover next year. Wheatley is expected to say that many of the changes made by the FSA, in particular the "credit deterrence" policy of taking a harder line against insider dealing and market abuses, will continue under the FCA. The FSA has been collecting record fines from financial firms, in particular Barclays for rigging the Libor interest rate. The government has just announced that fines in excess of enforcement case costs will in future go to the treasury, a step which may make the watchdog pause before taking on complex cases that require many resource-intensive months to probe. The financial industry will study the document Wheatley publishes on Tuesday to see how it will pursue three core aims of trustworthy markets, promoting effective competition and requiring firms to put consumers at the heart of their business. The industry is already alarmed the FCA can tell the public far earlier if it is taking action against a financial firm. - Reuters |
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