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Best paying countries by average days

mintme — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:28:53 +0000

Upon a study by Freshbooks in 2010, the countries where their invoices are paid the earliest are China with 11.9 days, Mexico, South Africa, Australia, New Zeland, Germany and Spain. Among the big economies with the longest invoice payment times are Italy and Uniked Kingdom. The country were invoices take longer to be paid is India with 31.7 days.

Interactive Things produced a visualization to illustrate the average days to pay:

Freshbooks are a provider of online billing systems mostly for freelancers, small businesses and service providers. As such, their data reflect well how the great mass of companies that make the wheels of the economy work are paid by others of their size and also by the large corporate ones.

Also, this data is more relevant than research based on surveys, which are by design actively selecting the sampling effort based on minimum cost and profile of the customer/customers paying for the research. Freshbook data is a neutral snapshot of their database at a given point in time.

SWIFT codes for US banks

mintme — Fri, 07 May 2010 22:44:02 +0000

In order to send a payment to the desired destination in the United States of America you need to take in consideration a few requirements for telegraphic transfers:

Account Number

A Fedwire Number / ABA or Routing Number is a 9 digit number ( is similar to Australia’s BSB system ). Payments to Credit Unions must have a Fedwire Number.

If a CHIPS Routing number or Fedwire / ABA is provided do not supply a US swift code (BIC or Bank Identification Code) instead
include as much of the Bank’s address as given.

If a Fedwire / ABA or CHIPS Routing number is not supplied a SWIFT BIC IS Mandatory. A SWIFT code is 8 or 11 characters
long, e.g. MLCOUS33, where MLCO = Merrill Lynch bank, CC = US or United States and 33 = Branch

Analytics for offline retailing

mintme — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:37:23 +0000

There are multiple and growing examples of how Internet is permeating the business culture of offline business.

A company in the UK detects and tracks the radio frequency signals from mobile phones to understand shopping behavior in retail spaces. Path Intelligence claims their technology is helping retailers to understand and optimize retail flow by gathering large amount of data free from human error and bias.

Among the questions that surveillance of mobile phones may help to answer, the company suggests:

Can shopping centres afford just one anchor store or do shoppers at M&S also visit John Lewis?
Would your shopping mall benefit from the inclusion of a gym?

Company Tax Returns in iXBRL format

mintme — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:28:52 +0000

From 1 April 2011, for accounting periods ending after 31 March 2010, XBRL format will replace PDF for accounts and computations. The most affected will be small companies and the self-employed. There is no converter from Excel files to XBRL format.

HMRC and Companies House have both adopted the same iXBRL format. A few commercial software packages are iXBRL-compliant.

DX Secure Mail Services

mintme — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:44:24 +0000

Secure Mail Services Ltd operates with the brand ‘DX secure value services’.

Calling cards of the mail company bear the logo DX and ’secure VALUED DELIVERIES’. The lack of availability to collect the item from local offices are one of the weakest points of the service. Residents in the UK are used to leave until Saturday morning the collection of their items at the local pick-up office.

The heading of DX’s card reads: We have an important delivery for you that requieres a signature, followed by a tracking number and instructions to ‘Arrange a delivery’: Please contact DX via our website www.thedx.co.uk/delivery or telephone us on 0844 277 3333. Please quote the Tracking Number overleaf. Your delivery will be made to your home or work between 9am-5pm Monday to Friday. Book by 4pm to arrange next day delivery.

Passports and visas, MBNA credit cards and many other companies use DX Network Services and Secure Mail Services. The company tries to compete against the Royal Mail in the market of end-to-end postal services in the UK.

Website of the Inland Revenue: HMRC Online

mintme — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:18:48 +0000

The domain of the Inland Revenue is www.hmrc.gov.uk. For some reason, typing just “hmrc.gov.uk”, without the triple w preceding the domain name, returns an error on every browser.

Usually SEO and user friendly websites redirect their non-www URLs to the www ones. For instance, http://direct.gov.uk redirects to http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/index.htm.

CT600 tax return documents required by HMRC

mintme — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:36:29 +0000

For a full return to satisfy the legal delivery requirement it must consist of:

a CT600
any appropriate supplementary pages and
the relevant attachments – full accounts and computations

Full accounts are those which a company is obliged to draw up under UK Company Law for its shareholders and must include at least a profit and loss account, balance sheet, notes to the accounts and directors’ report. Abbreviated accounts can be submitted to Companies House but not to the Revenue.

A computation is required to show how the profits liable to Corporation Tax have been calculated.

Buy the stocks with good recent performance and sell those that did worst

mintme — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:39:11 +0000

A very simple investment strategy, buying winners and selling losers, proved to be the best performing of all. With simplicity comes puzzlement: “In a well functioning market it ought not to work” say the authors of the study Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton and Elroy Dimson of the London Business School.

Called “momentum investing in equity markets”, the strategy delivers “striking” and “remarkably persistent” excess returns

The research, was published as part of ABN Amro’s latest Global Investment Returns Yearbookl. It examines the efficacy of systematic momentum investing; simply buying the stocks that had performed best over a prior time period and shorting those that had performed worst.

The team created two portfolios, one based on the 20 best-performing equities in the previous 12 months and the other the 20 worst performers using data on the UK’s 100 largest stocks since 1900. These portfolios were then re-calculated every month. The portfolio of winners produced compound annual returns of 15.2 per cent, turning £1 into more than £4.2m (€5.6m, $8.2m) by the end of 2007. In contrast, the portfolio of laggards returned just 4.5 per cent a year, turning £1 into £111.

The gulf was wider when the team used data from the entire London market since 1955; the portfolio based on the previous 12 month’s best-performing stocks returned 18.3 per cent a year, against 6.8 per cent for the erstwhile worst performers. The divide was starker when the portfolios were constructed on an equal-weighted, rather than market cap-weighted basis.

This momentum premium also appeared to hold abroad; it got positive returns from each of the 16 other countries they crunched post-2000 data for, with winners outperforming losers by 4 per cent a year in the US, 21 per cent in France and 39 per cent in Germany.

An investment approach based on this strategy would not be straightforward to execute. The research found portfolios need to be turned over regularly, adding to transaction costs, while smaller stocks may be difficult to short.

The academics argue it has widespread repercussions, with virtually every investment manager either betting in favour of momentum – from trendfollowing hedge fund managers to long-only managers who let winners run while cutting losers and engaging in “window dressing” of their portfolio – or, in the shape of small cap or value investors, betting against it.

“Every investor we have come across has, explicitly or implicitly, used a momentum or counter-momentum strategy,” said Prof Marsh. “[Consequently] people can look like a genius by accident or they can look a fool when they are quite smart.

“Active managers who ignore the momentum effect do so at their peril.”

The findings appear to run counter to a welter of studies, including the ABN yearbook, which suggest that small cap and value strategies tend to outperform over time, adding to the mystery.

Source: Ignore momentum at your peril by Steve Johnson, Financial Times

Debt and deleveraging: The global credit bubble and its economic consequences

mintme — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:50:29 +0000

Authors: Charles Roxburgh Susan Lund Tony Wimmer Eric Amar Charles Atkins Ju-Hon Kwek Richard Dobbs James Manyika

The recent bursting of the great global credit bubble not only led to the first worldwide recession since the 1930s, but also left an enormous burden of debt that now weighs on the prospects for recovery.

Today, government and business leaders are facing the twin questions of how to prevent similar crises in the future and how to guide their economies through the looming and lengthy process of debt reduction, or deleveraging.

To help address these questions, the McKinsey Global Institute launched a research effort to understand the growth of debt and leverage before the crisis in different countries, the economic consequences of deleveraging, and the practical implications for policy makers, financial regulators, and business executives. In the course of the research, they created an extensive fact base on debt and leverage1 in each sector of ten mature economies and four emerging economies

In addition, the McKinsey Global Institute analyzed 45 historic episodes of deleveraging, in which an economy significantly reduced its total debt-to-GDP ratio, that have occurred since 1930. This analysis adds new details to the picture of how leverage grew around the world before the crisis, and how the process of reducing it could unfold.

They find that:

Leverage levels are still very high in some sectors of several countries—and this is a global problem, not just a US one
To assess the sustainability of leverage, one must take a granular view using multiple sector-specific metrics. The analysis has identified ten sectors within five economies that have a high likelihood of deleveraging.
Empirically, a long period of deleveraging nearly always follows a major financial crisis.
Historic deleveraging episodes have been painful, on average lasting six to seven years and reducing the ratio of debt to GDP by 25 percent. GDP typically contracts during the first several years and then recovers.
If history is a guide, we would expect many years of debt reduction in specific sectors of some of the world’s largest economies, and this process will exert a significant drag on GDP growth. The findings hold several important implications for policy makers, regulators, and business leaders as they seek to navigate these unprecedented economic conditions and ensure greater financial stability and prosperity for the future.

Definitions

“debt”: the outstanding amount of debt, comparing across countries by measuring it relative to GDP
“leverage” : debt relative to assets or income and is measured differently, and often in multiple ways, for each sector.
“mature economies”: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States
“emerging economies”: Brazil, China, India, and Russia

Thousands of British landlords avoid taxes in spain

mintme — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:13 +0000

Inheritance Tax, IHT

Hundreds of firms are helping British citizens escape the Spanish inheritance tax by forming a UK Company.

A legion of tax advisors, lawyers and property consultants advise British landlords of properties in Spain form a UK Limited Liability company. They then transfer the ownership of the property passes into the hands of the company. In Spain the individuals who inherit are the ones taxed, not the estate of the deceased.

When the shareholder/s of the company pass away, the company is reorganised. Transfering some company shares falls outside the Spanish inheritance tax.

Income Tax

Many British retired in Spain evade taxes by purchasing a property in Gibraltar, usually a small flat in order to declare tax-residency in the colony turned into a tax heaven. This trick allow them to pay a nominal amount of tax and live up to half a year in their houses in Spain free of taxes on their income, including their pensions.