Investment banking pertains to certain activities of a financial services company or a corporate division that consist in advisory-based financial transactions on behalf of individuals, corporations, and governments. Traditionally associated with corporate finance, such a bank might assist in raising financial capital by underwriting or acting as the client's agent in the issuance of debt or equity securities. An investment bank may also assist companies involved in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and provide ancillary services such as market making, trading of derivatives and equity securities, FICC services or research. Most investment banks maintain prime brokerage and asset management departments in conjunction with their investment research businesses. As an industry, it is broken up into the Bulge Bracket, Middle Market, and boutique market.
The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered at 200 West Street in Lower Manhattan, with regional headquarters in London, Warsaw, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dallas and Salt Lake City, and additional offices in other international financial centers. Goldman Sachs is the second largest investment bank in the world by revenue and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. It is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.
Market portfolio is a portfolio consisting of a weighted sum of every asset in the market, with weights in the proportions that they exist in the market, with the necessary assumption that these assets are infinitely divisible.
Gary David Cohn is an American businessman, investment banker, investor, philanthropist, and politician who served as the 11th Director of the National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. He managed the administration's economic policy agenda. Before serving in the White House, Cohn was president and COO of Goldman Sachs, where he worked for more than 25 years. Cohn was appointed vice-chairman of IBM on January 5, 2021.
The "Fed model" or "Fed Stock Valuation Model" (FSVM), is a disputed theory of equity valuation that compares the stock market's forward earnings yield to the nominal yield on long-term government bonds, and that the stock market – as a whole – is fairly valued, when the one-year forward-looking I/B/E/S earnings yield equals the 10-year nominal Treasury yield; deviations suggest over-or-under valuation.
Peter Amory Weinberg is an American businessman. He spent almost twenty years of his career at Goldman Sachs before co-founding Perella Weinberg Partners with merger specialist, Joseph Perella in 2006. The firm provides M&A advisory and alternative asset management services. Weinberg serves as its Chief Executive Officer and Founding Partner.
Eileen Rominger is a partner at CamberView Partners. Previously, Rominger was the director of investment management at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and the global chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Paulson & Co. Inc. is an American investment management firm, established by its president and portfolio manager, John Paulson in 1994. Specializing in "global merger, event arbitrage and credit strategies", the firm had a relatively low profile on Wall Street until its hugely successful bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2007.
Clifford Scott Asness is an American hedge fund manager and the co-founder of AQR Capital Management. According to an April 2020 Forbes profile, Asness' estimated net worth was $2.6 billion.
Leon G. Cooperman is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager. He is the chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, a New York-based investment advisory firm managing over $3.3 billion in assets under management, the majority consisting of his personal wealth.
ACPI Investments is an independently owned, asset management firm serving private clients, trustees, charities, family offices, and institutions. The company has offices in London, Jersey, and South Africa and manages over $3 billion in global assets. ACPI offers services in portfolio management, private equity, corporate finance advise, and strategic wealth advisory.
GreenSky, Inc. is a financial technology company founded in 2006 based in Atlanta, Georgia. The company provides technology to banks and merchants to make loans to consumers for home improvement, solar, healthcare and other purposes. Financing for GreenSky credit programs is provided by federally-insured, federal and state-chartered financial institutions. From 2012 to 2016 nearly $5 billion had been lent through GreenSky credit program. In September 2021, Goldman Sachs announced to acquire GreenSky for about $2.24 billion and completed the acquisition in March 2022.
Ramon Martin Chavez is an American investment banker and entrepreneur. He is vice chairman and partner of Sixth Street Partners. Previously, he served in a variety of senior roles at Goldman Sachs, including chief information officer (2014–2017), chief financial officer, and global co-head of the firm's Securities Division. Marty was also a partner and member of Goldman's management committee. He was the chief technology officer and co-founder of Quorum Software Systems and CEO and co-founder of Kiodex. He is chairman of the board of computational pharmaceutical company Recursion, Board Observer of biotech company Earli and longevity biopharma company Cambrian Biopharma, and board member of Alphabet Inc.
Factor investing is an investment approach that involves targeting quantifiable firm characteristics or “factors” that can explain differences in stock returns. Security characteristics that may be included in a factor-based approach include size, low-volatility, value, momentum, asset growth, profitability, leverage, term and cost of carry.
Steven Strongin is a Senior Advisor at Goldman Sachs. Previously, he was the head of Global Investment Research and chair of the Global Markets Institute at Goldman Sachs. He was a member of the Management Committee, Firmwide Client and Business Standards Committee and was also co-chair of the Firmwide Technology Risk Committee. Strongin's writing on economic policy, investing and financial trends is featured across many news sources including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Business Insider. His article, “Beating Benchmarks,” won the Second Annual Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award for Outstanding Article after it was published in the Journal of Portfolio Management. He holds three patents for financial instruments. One of his patents was the Wavefront system, which describes how economic shocks ripple through the economy into company performance, market value and equity returns in the US market.
Low-volatility investing is an investment style that buys stocks or securities with low volatility and avoids those with high volatility. This investment style exploits the low-volatility anomaly. According to financial theory risk and return should be positively related, however in practice this is not true. Low-volatility investors aim to achieve market-like returns, but with lower risk. This investment style is also referred to as minimum volatility, minimum variance, managed volatility, smart beta, defensive and conservative investing.
The Members Exchange (MEMX) is an independently owned, technology-driven stock exchange founded by members to serve the interest of its founders and their collective client base. The founding members, which include nine major financial organizations, claim they seek to transform markets around the goals of transparency, innovation, and competition in order to align exchange services with the interests of market participants. It is a member-formed equities trading platform, and competes with the major equity exchanges: NYSE, Nasdaq, and CBOE.
The expression "everything bubble" refers to the correlated impact of monetary easing by the Federal Reserve on asset prices in most asset classes, namely equities, housing, bonds, many commodities, and even exotic assets such as cryptocurrencies and SPACs. The term is related to the Fed put, being the tools of direct and indirect quantitative easing that the Fed used to execute the monetary easing, and to modern monetary theory, which advocates the use of such tools, even in non-crisis periods, to create economic growth through asset price inflation. The term first came in use during the chair of Janet Yellen, but it is most associated with the subsequent chair of Jerome Powell, and the 2020–2021 period of the coronavirus pandemic.
David C. Blitz is a Dutch econometrician and quantitative researcher on financial markets. He is a founding researcher of Robeco Quantitative Investments.
Pim van Vliet is a Dutch fund manager and head of conservative equities at Robeco Asset Management.
