Financial diversification before modern portfolio theory: UK financial advice documents in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century

The paper offers textual evidence from a series of financial advice documents in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century of how UK investors perceived of and managed risk. In the world’s largest financial centre of the time, UK investors were familiar with the concept of correlation and financial advisers’ suggestions were consistent with the recommendations of modern portfolio theory in relation to portfolio selection strategies. From the 1870s, there was an increased awareness of the benefits of financial diversification - primarily putting equal amounts into a number of different securities - with much of the emphasis being on geographical rather than sectoral diversification and some discussion of avoiding highly correlated investments. Investors in the past were not so naïve as mainstream financial discussions suggest today

Stock market investors' use of stop losses and the disposition effect

The disposition effect is an investment bias where investors hold stocks at a loss longer than stocks at a gain. This bias is associated with poorer investment performance and exhibited to a greater extent by investors with less experience and less sophistication. A method of managing susceptibility to the bias is through use of stop losses. Using the trading records of UK stock market individual investors from 2006 to 2009, this paper shows that stop losses used as part of investment decisions are an effective tool for inoculating against the disposition effect. We also show that investors who use stop losses have less experience and that, when not using stop losses, these investors are more reluctant to realise losses than other investors

Generation of flat-top focussed beams for percussion drilling of ceramic and metal

In most laser micro-machining applications using copper vapour lasers, the system is configured for near-diffraction limited beam quality. This enables the beam to be tightly focussed to very small spot sizes and can be used for drilling very small holes or trepanning larger ones. The focused spot has a gaussian-like profile. In this paper a new laser system is presented that has a flat-top beam when focused. This has many advantages over gaussian beams when applied to percussion drilling and certain other applications. This system has demonstrated high speed percussion drilling of high quality 100 micron diameter holes in metals. We also report high speed (>200 holes/sec) percussion drilling in green sheet ceramic. The new laser system is a compact copper vapour laser (CVL) master-oscillator power-amplifier (MOPA) incorporating telescopic beam expansion in a high-gain double-pass amplifier. By configuring an oscillator for low coherence output and using a multimode optical fibre between the oscillator and a double-pass amplifier, high power (up to 34W) low divergence output beams having well defined flat-top far field beam profiles have been produced. This scheme generates a flat-top far-field beam profile by control of the spatial coherence of a flat-top near-field beam rather than the usual techniques of producing flattened gaussian beams from coherent gaussian beams. The output of such a MOPA has also demonstrated high power (34W average power, 80kW peak power) damage-free transmission through 100 micron core diameter optical fibres. This is of significant interest to system integrators and for certain applications

Towards the analysis of coral skeletal density-banding using Deep Learning

X-ray micro–computed tomography (µCT) is increasingly used to record the skeletal growth banding of corals. However, the wealth of data generated is time consuming to analyse for growth rates and colony age. Here we test an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to assist the expert identification of annual density boundaries in small colonies of massive Porites spanning decades. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained with µCT images combined with manually labelled ground truths to learn banding-related features. The CNN successfully predicted the position of density boundaries in independent images not used in training. Linear extension rates derived from CNN-based outputs and the traditional method were consistent. In the future, well-resolved 2D density boundaries from AI can be used to reconstruct density surfaces and enable studies focused on variations in rugosity and growth gradients across colony 3D space. We recommend the development of a community platform to share annotated images for AI

Developing Monolithically Integrated CdTe Devices Deposited by AP-MOCVD

Thin film deposition process and integrated scribing technologies are key to forming large area Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) modules. In this paper, baseline Cd1-xZnxS/CdTe solar cells were deposited by atmospheric-pressure metal organic chemical vapor deposition (AP-MOCVD) onto commercially available ITO coated boro-aluminosilicate glass substrates. Thermally evaporated gold contacts were compared with a screen printed stack of carbon/silver back contacts in order to move towards large area modules. P2 laser scribing parameters have been reported along with a comparison of mechanical and laser scribing process for the scribe lines, using a UV Nd:YAG laser at 355 nm and 532 nm fiber laser

Investing in charities in the nineteenth century: The financialization of philanthropy

This study deals with the impact of financialization on the development of charity during the nineteenth century. We argue that this has two key aspects: firstly, the growth of charitable provision via limited companies; and secondly, the financial audit by charities of the claimants who approached them. Limited companies operated mainly in the field of subsidized housing. These offered investors a satisfactory return, but at the cost of requirements regarding the level of rent and the behaviour expected from tenants which restricted the number of potential beneficiaries. The evaluation of claimants by charities was pioneered by, but not limited to, the new Charities Organization Society. This constituted a form of audit, with enquiry into claimants’ behaviour, financial status and prospects, and a refusal to support those seen as unreliable or unpredictable. We argue that these developments have significant implications for the social enterprise movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries