fisher capital management: May 2011

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Fisher Capital Management Corporate News: FSA guidelines will signal end of staff retention bonuses

http://www.love2reward.co.uk/rewards/feeds/fsa-guidelines-will-signal-end-of-staff-retention-bonuses.jsp

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

The financial services sector will no longer be able to offer staff retention bonuses, as a result of new payment guidelines from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).New rules put forth by the FSA attempt to align pay and other staff rewards with jeopardy, so as to avoid a situation where employees are given lucrative incentives to engage in potentially risky activities.

Jon Terry, remuneration partner for PwC, explained that the FSA has effectively “introduced the world’s toughest pay rules to the UK financial services industry” and warned that firms must take steps to comply before the June 30th deadline.

He added that while some measures will be welcomed by workers, but bonus restrictions are likely to be less popular.

“The latest announcements will spell the end of guarantees for existing employees, which had been an important tool for firms to retain talent,” he explained.

Last week, expert Chris Welford told the magazine’s readers that more freedom in the workplace can boost staff retention, which could be an alternative strategy for firms.

Fisher Capital Management Investment Solutions: The 3D scam: Reject and repeat

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/the-3d-scam-reject-and-repeat/47724
By Jason Hiner | April 22, 2011, 7:00am PDT

Last Friday, I departed from my normal business technology beat to talk about the geek entertainment event Game of Thrones. This week I’m going to plug into our Friday Geekend theme again, but this time the topic is something more nefarious — the entertainment industry’s misguided scam of the public.
The 3D gimmick has sadly infiltrated movies and television and is now threatening to infect video games and smartphones as well. There’s only one reason why the entertainment industry keeps relentlessly pushing this at consumers — it’s a transparent attempt to bleed more money out of people. And, while a lot of consumers have caught on to the scam, not everyone is doing enough to stop it.
3D is definitely NOT about innovation, as the industry would like you to believe. In fact, adding the current 3D effects to a movie or video of any kind subtracts from the picture. It muddies the colors and unsharpens the images, and it has to slow down the action shots because it makes people sick if things go too fast in 3D. In fact, optometrists estimate that up to 25% of people get headaches or nausea from simply watching 3D at all.

Photo credit: iStockphoto.com/4FR
My first hint at the 3D scam was in October 2009 when Toy Story and Toy Story 2 were re-released in the theaters as 3D movies. My kids were excited to see Toy Story on the big screen for the first time so we gladly ponied up the extra money to see the 3D version of the double feature. We weren’t very far into the first movie before I realized that the quality of the colors and images were actually worse in 3D. That was a big disappointment. Even my kids said that the 3D wasn’t as exciting as they thought it would be. There went an extra $24 down the drain ($3 extra for 3D for four people for two movies).
Of course, the Toy Story movies were standard 2D movies that were converted to 3D (which is actually the way most “3D” movies are still handled). So, what about movies that are natively shot with special 3D cameras, such as Avatar? I’ll admit that when I first saw Avatar in the theaters I was impressed at how well it wove in the 3D effects. But, my admiration wore off once I saw it on Blu-ray on a 240Hz LED TV and quickly realized that all of the colors and action shots suddenly came to life and really popped off the screen. That’s when it fully dawned on me what a horrible scam 3D really is. They are making us pay more money for a gimmicky, inferior experience. Sure, there are a few neat moments in most 3D movies, but the novelty wears very off quickly and it’s certainly not worth the trade-off in picture quality or action sequences.
I had started to see this coming a little sooner, and I should have pounced on it. Back at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, I was dazzled by the new LED TVs that Samsung showed off at its big press conference. The images were so sharp and the colors were so bright that the picture almost felt three dimensional. Plus the TV themselves were amazingly thin.
The next year, at CES 2010, I was surprised to see all of the TV manufacturers including Samsung pushing TVs with 3D glasses. I immediately felt like this was a step backward. I didn’t want to mess around with watching TV with 3D glasses. I wanted to see more super thin TVs with amazing pictures (at even better prices) like the ones I had seen the year before. After consumers rejected 3D TVs in 2010, the companies tried to come back at CES 2011 and pitch “no glasses” 3D. I wanted to shake my head and do a face-palm every time one of these electronics vendors mentioned 3D.
This is a bad detour for the entertainment and electronics industries, and they stubbornly refuse to let it die. In fact, they keep trying to push 3D on us, since many of these new products have been in planning for a year or two (before consumers started catching on to the 3D scam). The movie industry and movie theaters try to force us to only be able to watch some of their top movies in 3D (and pay extra for it). TV makers are forcing 3D into all of their new top-of-the-line LED TVs (and trying to make us to pay extra for it). Content companies are now making their Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy bundles include 3D discs (and trying to make us pay extra for it). Game companies such as Nintendo are integrating gimmicky 3D into their new systems. Mobile computing vendors such as HTC and LG are even trying to put 3D into their smartphones and tablets.
There’s only one way to stop the madness. Avoid 3D whenever possible.
This is a bad experiment that the industry is forcing consumers to subsidize. And since they can’t create a better product, they’ve simply latched on to 3D as a marketing ploy that the entertainment and electronics industries can use to trick people into thinking that they are getting a superior experience. It’s only working because just enough people are falling for the scam to keep it alive.
A lot of smart people have already sniffed this out and are avoiding 3D entertainment. It’s time for the rest of the public to reject 3D and stop being cheated.
It’s not that we don’t want innovation in real life imaging. Of course, we do. We just want real innovation, and don’t want to pay for badly-overpriced gimmicks and half-baked experiments.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Boiler Room Equipment: HeatSponge SIDEKICK Eventually Exposed

Boiler Room Equipment, Inc, is very pleased to eventually introduce the SIDEKICK type of condensing boiler economizers for industrial and conventional warm water boilers. Fisher Capital on Boiler Room Equipment, Inc, - The Sidekick continues to be in advancement for almost a couple of years and shows an transformative growth of high-proficiency installations in the boiler market. The SIDEKICK is a warning game changer the likes of which have not been knowledgeable since the launch of the very first condensing boilers. The SIDEKICK provides the capability to combine condensing boiler efficiencies to conventional boilers on a new or retrofit basis. The SIDEKICK enables a person with a conventional boiler system the power to recognize condensing efficiency gains that normally would demand the existing boiler to be destroyed and changed with a brand new condensing boiler. Conventional, non-condensing boilers can now realize the efficiency benefits of outdoor air temperature reset controls and lower circulating hot water loop temperatures. Sidekicks also allow for duel fuel condensing applications utilizing conventional boilers. The SIDEKICK features all stainless internal construction, stainless tubes and fins, and an insulated outer casing. Inspection and clean out ports make periodic maintenance and cleaning easy.

The effectiveness of the SIDEKICK moves far beyond simply energy retrieval to the ultra-productive procedure by which it really is chosen and created. Temperature recovery for condensing purposes presents a substantial quantity of variables that creates a catalog-approach to products collection nearly impossible. Boilerroom Equipment has developed a new method of quantifying heat recovery, the Recovery Rate, and integrated this into the design. The development of the Recovery Rate variable permits a customer to customize the level of heat recovery and cost straight to the specifications of each particular application. We establish this fresh idea in heat recovery design as 3D Modularity, for modular construction in three dimensions. Based on a "Mass-Customization" approach to product development, Bruce will consider all of the application design constraints and will design a SIDEKICK enhanced to satisfy the exact overall performance needs at the most reasonably competitive selling price. Bruce has been given the ability to consider all aspects of the heat exchanger design relative to the price of the equipment and generate a fully priced proposal all in real-time; a software and engineering accomplishment that added over one thousand hours of coding and heat transfer modification to Bruce's core program. This means Bruce can handle all inquiries and generate proposals in real time by himself. The near elimination of sales and support overhead and significantly reduced project execution overhead requirements the Bruce software provides allows us to offer a product superior to any before it at pricing and responsiveness levels no conventional competitor could hope to match.

Fisher Capital Management - Japan Elects a New Premier Part 1

Fisher Capital Management Eight and a half months after riding the Democratic Party of Japan’s

(DPJ) historic lower house victory into office, Prime Minister Yukio

Hatoyama announced his resignation, having haphazardly frittered

away a chest brimming with political capital.

Major newspapers said that Hatoyama was resigning mainly for

two reasons: his failure to keep his promise to relocate the functions

of US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, out of Okinawa

Prefecture, and a political funding scandal that included his mother’s

provision of some ¥1.26 billion to him over years.

Following Hatoyama’s resignation, Minister of Finance Naoto Kan

was elected as the new Prime Minister, the fifth in four years.

At his inaugural press conference Kan proposed a comprehensive

reconstruction of the economy, public finance, and social security

as his priority, in addition to reforming public administration, and

conducting responsible diplomatic and defence policy.

Fisher Capital Management Report- Japan Elects a New Premier Part 1: The biggest question surrounding the once-popular new government

is whether Kan can really turn over a new leaf for the DPJ. In his

first policy speech to the Diet as prime minister, Kan sought to set

his administration apart from the previous one by vowing to build

“a strong economy, strong finances and strong social welfare”.

Kan stressed the need to jolt Japan out of its currently weak state,

which he attributed to “anaemic economic growth, ballooning

public debt and dwindling public trust in the viability of Japan's

social security system”.

Observers and practitioners believe that the government is unlikely

to announce any significant new policy initiatives, as Kan was

already one of the main architects behind the previous

administration’s economic policy, although some changes have just

been announced in the DPJ election manifesto for the Upper House

election. For instance it drops the promise of doubling monthly

child allowances to ¥26000 next year.

“I hope to carry over the torch of rebuilding Japan passed on to

me by Hatoyama”, he observed at a press conference after his

election. Alan Feldman, chief economist at Morgan Stanley in Japan,

says that “although Kan’s initial speech did include some new

elements, the main message was continuity with Hatoyama’s

economic policies. Investors are likely to welcome the innovations,

but to remain sceptical of the overall philosophy”.

However, economists believe Kan will face a mountain of challenges

both at home and abroad in the near future. First, he needs to

rebuild that political capital ahead of the upper house elections.

Public support for the DPJ has recovered sharply after his

appointment suggesting that voters have, for now, forgiven the

ruling Democrats for the previous leaders’ policy mistakes.

But it remains to be seen whether the initial popularity of the Kan

administration will translate into a strong performance, and whether

Kan will ultimately be given a strong enough mandate to push

through difficult policy decisions.

Major newspaper polls give Prime Minister approval ratings of

between 60 and 70 percent; but such ratings can be very fickle.

The election will be an uphill battle for the DPJ. The DPJ is without

one of its coalition partners, the Social Democratic Party who left

the ruling camp over Hatoyama’s failure to remove the US base

from Okinawa, as demanded by its leader, Mizuho Fukushima.

The two parties that remain, the DPJ and the People’s New Party,

hold 122 of the upper house’s 242 seats, the slimmest majority

possible. Should the coalition lose that majority in the coming

election, it would mean a split Diet — its majority would only

remain in the lower house. And that would make passing bills

extremely difficult.

Fisher Capital Management Report- Japan Elects a New Premier Part 1: Kan will have plenty on the economic front too. In terms of fiscal

policy, as a former Finance minister he has turned into a fiscal

conservative, having been a champion of funnelling revenue from

higher taxes toward government spending in order to achieve

economic growth. “Economic growth, fiscal reconstruction and

social welfare reform will be achieved together”, he told reporters.

Fisher Capital Management - Japan Elects a New Premier Part 2

Fisher Capital Management Eight and a half months after riding the Democratic Party of Japan’s

(DPJ) historic lower house victory into office, Prime Minister Yukio

Hatoyama announced his resignation, having haphazardly frittered

away a chest brimming with political capital.

Major newspapers said that Hatoyama was resigning mainly for

two reasons: his failure to keep his promise to relocate the functions

of US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, out of Okinawa

Prefecture, and a political funding scandal that included his mother’s

provision of some ¥1.26 billion to him over years.

Fisher Capital Management - Japan Elects a New Premier Part 2: Instead of deregulation and lower corporate taxes, he envisions

increased employment and consumption through focused

government spending in nursing, medicine and other social welfare

fields. But some economists expressed doubts; they say there is no

guarantee that the positive effect of government spending can

steadily outpace the negative effects of tax hikes.

Kan seems to be open to the idea of raising Japan’s consumption

tax from its current level of 5%, though the approach of the upperhouse

election on July and concerns over a political backlash suggest

caution will be the government’s modus operandi.

“Any rise in the consumption tax rate must be offset by lower levies

on daily goods as well as refunds for low-income households”, he

recently said. But he also hopes to reduce corporate taxes from the

current 40% rate to around 25%, in line with other major countries.

In the foreign exchange market, Kan has earned a reputation as a

weak-yen advocate. “The business community says that a yen in

the mid-90s against the dollar is appropriate, so it would be better

if it weakens a bit further”, he said in January, shortly after becoming

finance minister.

Fisher Capital Management - Japan Elects a New Premier Part 2: Market observers believe that Kan still supports a weaker yen and

that the Japanese currency could depreciate against the US dollar.

Regarding monetary policy, Kan is generally considered an advocate

of inflation-targeting and quantitative easing. As finance minister,

he has put some political pressure on the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to

fight deflation more aggressively, he nudged the BOJ to double a

special bank lending program introduced in December. The bond

market believes Kan is a wise choice to manage the sustainability

of Japan’s government debt.

The DPJ had promised to unveil a long-term plan to improve public

finances. However, “postponement is likely because of the current

political churn, and any real ‘meat’ in the plan will probably not

be disclosed until after the Upper House election” … says Flemming

Nielsen, senior analyst at Danske research.

Kan is a self-made man, ascending into politics after years toiling

in citizen movements and he has a reputation as a quick learner

and a pragmatic politician, with sharp elbows and an aversion to

any criticism.

The country he now leads is facing dire long-term problems that

beg for strong leadership, including a staggering level of public

debt, a stagnant economy, and an ageing population. He has a few

weeks to fix the impression left by nine months of incompetent DPJ

governance.

If he fails, the party will be routed in the elections for the Diet’s

upper house.