Futures

The Future Perfect

The Future Perfect Tense

English grammar can be very difficult for foreign students and native speakers alike! Using and understanding future tenses can be the most difficult area to learn.

The future perfect tense can be somewhat difficult to understand; however, to break it down, the future perfect tense is used to say that something will be done, completed or achieved by a certain time in the future.

For example – “the teacher will have finished grading essays by the end of the week” or “the train soon will have completed 1000 miles”, are sentences that use the future perfect tense.

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The Six Minute Book Summary of Competing

Executive Summary

In Competing for the Future, by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, the authors focus on techniques and production of strategic planning.  The main point of the book was in order for a company to succeed into the future, they have to stop looking at the past and start focusing on future plans for the company, and stop being a follower and start being a leader.  The authors focus for a few chapters on reinvention and how the corporate need it.

According to the authors, through experience and discovery, many companies have fallen flat because of their lack of regeneration.  They encourage top management to hire outside the norm; this may bring a nice, fresh change to the work environment.  Every employee brings a different quality to the work environment.  In order to get to the future, a company must first define it.  In defining the future, Hamel and Prahalad suggest assembling “the best possible assumption base about the future.”  A company’s vision changes due to the information collected.

The authors also discuss how to get to the future before your competition.  Shares how to amplify tomorrow’s corporate world.  Corporate visions “does not guarantee competitive success.”  In order for a company to be fully functional and successful, its foresight should be foreseen by continuous leverage of core competencies.  And in order for top management to create a successful vision of the future, a business needs dedicated top management that can look outside the box of what the norm is and create an idea that no one has thought of yet.  Too often competitors are observed by their resources and not enough by their resourcefulness.

They talk about several reasons it makes sense to conceive of competition for competence as intercorporate competition.  The first reason is that core competencies are not product-specific.  They contribute to the competitiveness of a variety of products or services.  The second reason is that a core competence contributes to the competitiveness of a range of products or services.  The third reason is because the investment, risk-taking, and time frame required to achieve core competence leadership often exceeds the resources and patience of a single business unit.  And lastly, only by building and nurturing core competencies can top management ensure the continuance of the enterprise.

The book discusses the terms strategic intent, defining it as the dream that energizes a company is often something more sophisticated, and more positive, and strategic architecture, defining it as a high-level blueprint for the deployment of new functionalities, the acquisition of new competencies or the migration of existing competencies, and for the reconfiguring of the interface with customers.    “Strategic intent is strategic architecture’s capstone.  A strategic architecture may point out the way to the future, but it’s an ambitious and compelling strategic intent that provides the emotional and intellectual energy for the journey.  Strategic architecture is the brain; strategic intent is the heart.”

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Introduction to a Futures Contract

Futures exchanges focus on the buying and selling of futures contracts which are essentially another form of derivative contract. With the futures contract you are in a position to make or take delivery of a financial or non-financial asset according to the applicable terms.

The distinction between such contracts and option grants is that a contract has a mandatory effect on the transactions which you engage in. While options only cover the rights towards the transaction without necessarily taking a position under obligation.

Futures contracts are also referred to as exchange traded derivatives, and relevant margins to these contracts traded on an exchange are determined by the clearing house which forms part of the futures exchange.

Although futures are not securities in their own right as with stocks and other types of securities, they entail the trading of particular commodities on a specific date in the future (i.e, delivery date or settlement date) based on the final agreed price.

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Investing in Currency Futures Trading

Futures are standardized forward contracts traded in stocks. They are a uniform term financial instruments with which parties agree to exchange a certain amount at maturity of particular financial assets at a set price.

Or in the case of index futures, to liquidate a sum of money equal to the difference between the value of the reference to the signing of the contract and the value of that index on the expiry date.

The FX futures contract is designed for the exchange of one currency for another at a designated date in the future on the basis of a fixed price (exchange rate). The majority of contracts undergo physical delivery, which means those possessed at the end of the last trading day, the relevant payments are rendered in each currency.

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