British Council Education Fair 2013, Athens, Greece

Congratulations to Kadi Huang, Chris Himpich, Alex Priest and Daniel Lim for reaching the final of the Universities Business Challenge! In Particular to ICMA Centre students Kadi Huang, 2nd year Finance and Investment Banking, and Daniel Lim, 1st year Finance & Investment Banking. The semi-final was held at the offices of P&G (Procter & Gamble) in Weybridge and required the ten semi-finalists to purchase, renovate and manage a hotel business in Thailand.Tasks included corporate social responsibility, media presentation, creative thinking and networking. The Henley team produced an outstanding performance to win with a profit of £151K (moderated by a stakeholder engagement score).They will join nine finalists from other top business schools at the London HQ of IBM UK in Southbank on Friday 22 March for the chance to win up to £1000. We wish them the best of luck!

Award winning research “The Price of Sin Aversion” by ICMA Centre Associate Professor of Finance Andreas Hoepner and co-author Hampus Adamsson has hit the headlines this week, with the Financial Times featuring an article about it in their paper on Monday.

Fidelity, the asset manager with $2.4 trillion assets under management, recently announced the launch of two index mutual funds with a 0% fee! This announcement is interesting for several reasons. First, the asset management industry has been involved in an intense price war and this new fee level of 0% represents a very tough benchmark for the competition to beat. Not surprisingly, the share price of rival asset managers fell by a few percentage points shortly after the announcement. Second, the new fee level is unusual as it indicates that, for the first time, investors could get exposure to both US and international equities without incurring any fee. This is a curious business decision. How will Fidelity manage to pay for all its expenses? Will this product be a loss-making venture? Is there more to it than meets the eyes?