Performance Evaluation of Mutual Funds in Pakistan

In Pakistan Mutual Funds were introduced in 1962, when the public offering of National Investment (Unit) Trust (NIT) was introduced which is an open-end mutual fund. In 1966 another fund that is Investment Corporation of Pakistan (ICP) was establishment. ICP subsequently offered a series of closed-end mutual funds. Up to early 1990s, twenty six (26) closed-end ICP mutual funds had been floated by Investment Corporation of Pakistan. After considering the option of restructuring the corporation, government decided to wind up ICP in June, 2000. In 2002, the Government started Privatisation of the Investment Corporation of Pakistan. 25 Out of 26 closed-end funds of ICP were split into two lots. There had been a competitive bidding for the privatisation of funds. Management Right of Lot-A comprising 12 funds was acquired by ABAMCO Limited. Out of these 12, the first 9 funds were merged into a single closed-end fund and that was named as ABAMCO Capital Fund, except 4th ICP mutual fund as the certificate holders of the 4th ICP fund had not approved the scheme of arrangement of Amalgamation into ABAMCO capital fund in their extra ordinary general meeting held on December 20, 2003. The fund has therefore been reorganised as a separate closedend trust and named as ABAMCO Growth Fund. Rest of the three funds were merged into another single and named as ABAMCO Stock Market Fund. So far as the Lot-B is concerned, it comprised of 13 ICP funds, for all of these thirteen funds, the Management Right was acquired by PICIC Asset Management Company Limited. All of these thirteen funds were merged into a single closed-end fund which was named as “PICIC Investment Fund”. Later on the 26th fund of ICP (ICP-SEMF) was also acquired by PICIC Asset Management Company Limited

Open-Source and Proprietary Library Automation Software: A Comparative Academic Librarian's Perspective

The purpose of this study was to get an understanding of how academic librarians perceive open-source and proprietary library software. The researchers used a survey research approach and a self-constructed questionnaire as data collection tool. The study targeted 103 library professionals working at HEC-recognized degree awarding institutions (DAIs) and universities in Lahore, both public and private sectors, yielding an 84% response rate. To meet research objectives, descriptive and inferential statistics were applied. Study findings explored that library software should have the facility of advanced searching, library standards, and a user-friendly interface. Comparative analysis revealed that open-source library software contains more modules and requires highly skilled employees. On the other hand, human resources with minor skills can use proprietary software. Factors that prevent adopting OSS for academic libraries include a lack of technical support, skilled and motivated library professionals, inadequate cooperation between supervisors and subordinates, and insufficient training opportunities. Experienced library professionals should guide and offer full cooperation in the selection and implementation of software. Library schools and associations should play a decisive role through school curriculum and professional development programs in preparing graduates and practitioners for embracing modern technologies. Open-source software developers should also organize training programs for software users to work independently in libraries

Machine Learning: The Backbone of Intelligent Trade Credit-Based Systems

Technology has turned into a significant differentiator in the money and traditional recordkeeping systems for the financial industry. To depict two customers as potential investors, it is mandatory to give the complex innovation that they anticipate and urge to purchase. In any case, it is difficult to keep on top of and be a specialist in each of the new advancements that are accessible. By reappropriating IT administrations, monetary administrations firms can acquire prompt admittance to the most recent ability and direction. Financial systems, along with machine learning (ML) algorithms, are vital for critical concerns like secure financial transactions and automated trading. These are the key to the provision of financial decisions for investors and stakeholders for the firms which are working with the trade credit (TC) approach, in Small and Medium Industries (SMEs). Huge and very sensitive data is processed in a limited time. The trade credit is a reason for more financial gains. The impact of TC with predictive machine learning algorithms is the reason why intelligent and safe revenue generation is the main target of the proposed study. That is, the combination of financial data and technology (FinTech) domains is a potential reason for sales growth and ultimately more profit.publishedVersio

CommuNety: deep learning-based face recognition system for the prediction of cohesive communities

Effective mining of social media, which consists of a large number of users is a challenging task. Traditional approaches rely on the analysis of text data related to users to accomplish this task. However, text data lacks significant information about the social users and their associated groups. In this paper, we propose CommuNety, a deep learning system for the prediction of cohesive networks using face images from photo albums. The proposed deep learning model consists of hierarchical CNN architecture to learn descriptive features related to each cohesive network. The paper also proposes a novel Face Co-occurrence Frequency algorithm to quantify existence of people in images, and a novel photo ranking method to analyze the strength of relationship between different individuals in a predicted social network. We extensively evaluate the proposed technique on PIPA dataset and compare with state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique for the prediction of relationship between different individuals and the cohesiveness of communities

Determination of reference ranges of plasma glycosaminoglycans in a tertiary care centre

Objective: To determine reference ranges of plasma glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) in a population presenting at a tertiary care centre of Department of Chemical Pathology and Endocrinology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Rawalpindi from January 2020 to December 2020.Methodology: An observational cross-sectional study which involved one hundred and twenty (120) disease-free healthy population was selected by non-probability consecutive sampling at a 90% confidence interval with a 5% margin of error. Plasma glycosaminoglycans were assayed by manual ELISA technique. The study population was stratified according to gender. Normality of data was assessed by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Dixon range test was employed to find outliers. After removing the outliers, mean ±, SD was calculated for plasma GAG levels (mg/L). Sex-specific reference values were determined Results: In our study, the total male population was 62 (51.7%), while the female was 58 (48.3%) in the disease-free population (n=120). The overall GAG levels were calculated as 24.12±7.9 mg/l in blood samples against the reference range of 11.48-36.76 mg/l. In males, GAG levels were found as 24.67±6.65 against a reference range of 11.67-37.7 mg/l, while in females, it was 22.22±5.36 against the reference interval of 11.71-32.73 mg/l.Conclusion: The reference range for plasma GAG was found 11.48-36.76 mg/l in our study population. GAG levels differ significantly among males and females with reference ranges of 11.67-37.7 mg/l and 11.71-32.73 mg/l, respectively

Identification of clinically significant drug-drug interactions in cardiac intensive care units of two tertiary care hospitals in Peshawar, Pakistan

Purpose: To identify clinically significant potential drug-drug interactions in cardiac intensive care units of two tertiary care hospitals in Peshawar, Pakistan, and to compare the various potential drug-drug interactions related parameters between the government and private hospitals included in the study.Method: A prospective study was conducted in the cardiac intensive care units of the two hospitals, viz, Lady Reading Hospital Peshawar (LRH) and Northwest General Hospital and Research Center Peshawar (NWGH &RC), which are government and private hospitals, respectively. Samples of 260 and 250 patients from LRH and NWGH & RC, respectively, were evaluated. Patient medication charts were evaluated for potential drug-drug interactions and clinically significant potential drug-drug interactions using Micromedex DrugReax. The data were statistically analyzed.Results: A high prevalence of potential drug-drug interactions was reported in both hospitals: 92 and 96.9 % in Northwest General Hospital and Research Center, and Lady Reading Hospital, respectively, of which half were clinically significant. A total of 19 interacting drug pairs contributed to the clinically significant potential drug-drug interactions. Independent sample t-test showed a significant difference in the potential drug-drug interactions of both hospitals. Furthermore, a significant relationship was found between the number of potential drug-drug interactions, on the one hand, and the number of prescribed drugs and age, on the other.Conclusion: A high prevalence of potential drug-drug interactions, particularly clinically significant potential drug-drug interactions, calls for proper identification of these interactions and monitoring of patients to minimize adverse outcomes and improve patient therapy.Keywords: Pharmacy service, Drug interactions, Critical/intensive care, Adverse outcome

Detecting Earning Management: Deferred Taxes vs Accruals: A Pakistani Perspective

Objective: Earning Management has been one of the major areas of accounting research which has received a great attention in the past and also quite recently. Detecting earning management has always been one of the major areas of concern for the researchers. Earnings Management is pervasive. There are a number of models available to Detect and measure the earnings management activity. Methodology: The accrual models are the most used models to proxy the discretionary accruals and the earnings management. The effectiveness of the accrual models is somewhat skeptical at times when researchers found some inconsistencies in results while using the accrual models.  The researchers are still finding some better and effective model that can be used to better measure and capture the earnings management activity. The focus of this study is to find out as to whether a deferred tax as compared to accrual models is more useful in measuring or detecting the earnings management in Pakistani perspective. The study is based on the Pakistani companies listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE). This study is expected to be an addition to the existing research as to whether the models used for detecting earnings management through deferred taxes by Philips et al (2003) are also applicable to Pakistani Scenario which is a developing country. The study used Probit Regression Model with pooled cross sectional data to measure the usefulness of both; accruals and deferred taxes (the proxies)   used as better measure for Earnings management. Results: The results of the study are inconsistent with the Philips et al. (2003) study. Based on this study it is concluded that deferred tax is not incrementally useful along with the other accrual measure. The accruals models show significant results and are more powerful metric to detect earnings management as compared to the deferred taxes in Pakistan

Impact of Firm's Capital Expenditure on Working Capital Management: An Empirical Study across Industries in Pakistan

Various researchers have studied the Impact of capital expenditure on working capital management. This paper aims to analyze the impact of capital expenditure in the light of the fixed effect model on 96 listed companies with respect to working capital management. Data related to the specific time period of 2007-2010 has been focused. The impact of capital expenditure, operating expenditure and finance expenditure on working capital has been analyzed. In this connection, keeping in mind nature of the variables of the study, Net Liquidity Balance (NLB) and Working Capital Requirement (WCR) has been applied as a proxy of working capital management. Then six hypotheses were conducted in two groups. In the first group, we examine the impact of capital expenditure, operating expenditure and financial expenditure on Net Liquidity Balance and in the second group, we investigate the impact of capital expenditures, operating expenditures and financial expenditures on Working Capital Requirement. Capital expenditure has the insignificant relationship with Net Liquidity Balance and Working Capital Requirement. Operating expense has the significant negative relationship with Net Liquidity Balance and significant positive relationship with Working Capital Requirement. Finance expense has the significant negative relationship with Net Liquidity Balance and significant positive relationship with Working Capital Requirement

Post Thrombolytic St-Segment Resolution Outcome in Acute Myocardial Infarction Patients

OBJECTIVES: The main objective of this study was to assess post thrombolytic resolution of ST-segment and its outcome in patients with acute myocardial infarction. METHODOLOGY: This Prospective Comparative Study was carried out at the Cardiology Unit of Ayub Teaching Hospital, Abbottabad. All patients irrespective of gender and age with ST-Segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), having no immediate access to angioplasty and thrombolysed with streptokinase, were included in this study. ECG was taken at the beginning and 90 minutes after the administration of streptokinase. Based on ST-segment resolution on ECG taken at 90 minutes these patients were classified into group A and B. Group A included patients with ST-segment resolution while group B showed no resolution of ST-segment after streptokinase administration. These patients were followed during their hospital stay for complications such as arrhythmias, cardiogenic shock, acquired ventricular septal defects (VSD) aneurysm and death. RESULTS: Among 115 patients, 94 were male and 21 female. Group A included 102 (89%) patients and group B included 13 (11%). In group A, only 1 (0.98 %) patient developed complications and in group B, 13 patients (100%) developed complications. Arrhythmias were the most common complication among MI patients in group A while cardiogenic shock was the commonest complication in group B. CONCLUSION: ST-segment resolution is a practical and applicable indicator of successful thrombolysis and has a significant correlation with clinical outcome in acute myocardial patients after thrombolysis with streptokinase