Since the year-end is the typical point in time at which investors review the performance of their portfolios, we want to shed a light on the Lipper global bond, equity, and mixed-assets classifications with the best and worst average performance. In addition, this report also showcases the performance of the best- and worst-performing funds/ETFs for each asset type and the average performance of the most relevant Lipper global classifications from a euro investor point of view for each asset type.   Methodology In order to calculate the average performance of the funds and ETFs within the Lipper global classifications (LGCs)

Memories of Apple nearly going bankrupt in the mid-1990s scared Steve Jobs and his colleagues. Now worth some $840 billion, it has kept an absurdly conservative balance sheet for two decades. Apple returned about $50 billion to shareholders last fiscal year through share buybacks and dividends. Yet the company, whose free cash flow more than replenishes that every year, still had over $160 billion of net cash last quarter. Doubling the payout for three years would still leave current boss Tim Cook with all the cash he needs.U.S. tax law created another balance-sheet distortion. Overseas profit was sheltered from American

Uber’s early backers are on a collision course with their own greed. Japan’s SoftBank and allied investors want to buy roughly one-sixth of the bumptious ride-hailing firm. Existing owners can sell at a $48 billion valuation, or about 30 percent below the last one. Even with a markdown, they could make many times their money. The promise of more, however risky, will cloud the thinking. Consider just one of the many rounds of funds raised under now-deposed co-founder Travis Kalanick. A so-called Series B investment in 2011 judged Uber to be worth $300 million before an injection of $37 million of

This Monday Morning Memo is written based on a speech by Jean-René Giraud, Chief Executive Officer at TrackInsight  during the TrackInsight Investor Summit–Germany in Frankfurt on March 29, 2017. During his speech Jean-René discussed some common errors advisors and investors make as they evaluate exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Tracking error as a measure to evaluate the tracking quality of an ETF The first wrong assumption he stressed was that investors believe tracking error is a good measure to evaluate the quality of an ETF; they think a low tracking error is good, while a high tracking error is bad. He pointed