Investment

Investment or investing[1] is a term with several closely-related meanings in business management, finance and economics, related to saving or deferring consumption. An asset is usually purchased, or equivalently a deposit is made in a bank, in hopes of getting a future return or interest from it. The word originates in the Latin "vestis", meaning garment, and refers to the act of putting things (money or other claims to resources) into others' pockets

Types of investments

The term "investment" is used differently in economics and in finance. Economists refer to a real investment (such as a machine or a house), while financial economists refer to a financial asset, such as money that is put into a bank or the market, which may then be used to buy a real asset.

Business Management

The investment decision (also known as capital budgeting) is one of the fundamental decisions of business management: managers determine the assets that the business enterprise obtains. These assets may be physical (such as buildings or machinery), intangible (such as patents, software, goodwill), or financial (see below). The manager must assess whether the net present value of the investment to the enterprise is positive; the net present value is calculated using the enterprise's marginal cost of capital.

A business might invest with the goal of making profit. These are marketable securities or passive investment. It might also invest with the goal of controlling or influencing the operation of the second company, the investee. These are called intercorporate, long-term and strategic investments. Hence, a company can have none, some or total control over the investee's strategic, operating, investing and financing decisions. One can control a company by owning over 50% ownership, or have the ability to elect a majority of the Board of Directors.

Economics

In economics, investment is the production per unit time of goods which are not consumed but are to be used for future production. Examples include tangibles (such as building a railroad or factory) and intangibles (such as a year of schooling or on-the-job training). In measures of national income and output, gross investment I is also a component of Gross domestic product (GDP), given in the formula GDP = C + I + G + NX, where C is consumption, G is government spending, and NX is net exports. Thus investment is everything that remains of production after consumption, government spending, and exports are subtracted.I is divided into non-residential investment (such as factories) and residential investment (new houses). Net investment deducts depreciation from gross investment.
It is the value of the net increase in the capital stock per year.Investment, as production over a period of time ("per year"), is not capital. The time dimension of investment makes it a flow. By contrast, capital is a stock, that is, an accumulation measurable at a point in time (say December 31st).Investment is often modeled as a function of Income and Interest rates, given by the relation I = f(Y, r). An increase in income encourages higher investment, whereas a higher interest rate may discourage investment as it becomes more costly to borrow money. Even if a firm chooses to use its own funds in an investment, the interest rate represents an opportunity cost of investing those funds rather than loaning them out for interest.

Finance

In finance, investment=cost of capital, like buying securities or other monetary or paper (financial) assets in the money markets or capital markets, or in fairly liquid real assets, such as gold, real estate, or collectibles. Valuation is the method for assessing whether a potential investment is worth its price. Returns on investments will follow the risk-return spectrum.Types of financial investments include shares, other equity investment, and bonds (including bonds denominated in foreign currencies). These financial assets are then expected to provide income or positive future cash flows, and may increase or decrease in value giving the investor capital gains or losses.Trades in contingent claims or derivative securities do not necessarily have future positive expected cash flows, and so are not considered assets, or strictly speaking, securities or investments. Nevertheless, since their cash flows are closely related to (or derived from) those of specific securities, they are often studied as or treated as investments.Investments are often made indirectly through intermediaries, such as banks, mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, collective investment schemes, and investment clubs. Though their legal and procedural details differ, an intermediary generally makes an investment using money from many individuals, each of whom receives a claim on the intermediary.

Personal finance

Within personal finance, money used to purchase shares, put in a collective investment scheme or used to buy any asset where there is an element of capital risk is deemed an investment. Saving within personal finance refers to money put aside, normally on a regular basis. This distinction is important, as investment risk can cause a capital loss when an investment is realized, unlike saving(s) where the more limited risk is cash devaluing due to inflation.In many instances the terms saving and investment are used interchangeably, which confuses this distinction. For example many deposit accounts are labeled as investment accounts by banks for marketing purposes. Whether an asset is a saving(s) or an investment depends on where the money is invested: if it is cash then it is savings, if its value can fluctuate then it is investment.

Real estate

In real estate, investment is money used to purchase property for the sole purpose of holding or leasing for income and where there is an element of capital risk. Unlike other economic or financial investment, real estate is purchased. The seller is also called a Vendor and normally the purchaser is called a Buyer.

Residential Real Estate

The most common form of real estate investment as it includes the property purchased as peoples houses. In many cases the Buyer does not have the full purchase price for a property and must engage a lender such as a Bank, Finance company or Private Lender. Different countries have their individual normal lending levels, but usually they will fall into the range of 70-90% of the purchase price. Against other types of real estate, residential real estate is the least risky.

Commercial Real Estate

Commercial real estate is the owning of a small building or large warehouse a company rents from so that it can conduct its business. Due to the higher risk of Commercial real estate, lending rates of banks and other lenders are lower and often fall in the range of 50-70%.

HONDA

From hybrids to natural gas to hydrogen, Honda has long been at the forefront in the exploration and development of next-generation powerplants and alternative fuel sources, in the quest to help reduce the demand for fossil fuels and slow global warming.Nothing, however, intrigues the technologically curious and environmentally conscious quite like the future development—and more important, mass consumer-level availability—of Honda’s revolutionary zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell system.First delivered in limited supply to U.S. and Japanese customers in December 2002 in the form of the FCX fuel cell vehicle (a world’s first at the time), it was just 10 months later, in October 2003, that Honda announced the development of the “Honda FC Stack,” a next-generation fuel cell capable of starting at subfreezing temperatures.

With this high-output but much more compact fuel cell stack, it’s possible to start the vehicle at 20 degrees below zero centigrade (-4ºF), a task that had proved difficult with traditional fluorine-based electrolyte membranes. After receiving approval from Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport in late 2003, the FC Stack underwent numerous starting tests in sub-zero conditions in addition to driving tests on public roads at low temperatures.

YAMAHA

The new and improved Yamaha Design Café is launched

First launched over 7 years ago the mission of the Design Cafe site was to gather feedback and opinion from Yamaha customer's in Europe. Yamaha wanted to harness the newly emerging power of the internet and interact with the visitors coming to the Yamaha websites by placing a range of questionnaires online.

The Design Cafe is managed by the Yamaha's Product Planning group who are responsible for, as there name suggest product planning - determining the Yamaha product line up in Europe, and to highlight and prioritize which product improvements should be scheduled into the Yamaha development plan.

Yamaha's Product Planning group did not want the exchange of information to be only one way on the Design Cafe, so in return for the valuable input and opinion from visitors it also made a range of exclusive and in-depth articles about the Yamaha models and their product development available.

The new Design Cafe now comes with a rich archive going back to 2004 and over the coming months this will be enriched further, with articles going back to 2000.Available in English, French, German and Italian the new site will also have information available in Spanish

Top Celebrity Woman

Winfrey recently opened a special school for girls in South AfricaAmerican talk show host Oprah Winfrey is the richest woman in entertainment, according to business magazine Forbes.Its latest poll estimates her net worth at $1.5bn (£760m), based on the $225m (£114m) she is said to earn from TV, radio, magazines and other ventures.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling comes second in the list with a net worth estimated at $1bn (£506m).Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, pop star Madonna and singer Celine Dion take the next three places.To assemble its inaugural list of the 21 richest women in entertainment, Forbes is said to have "scoured the music, television, film and publishing industries".

TOP 10 RICHEST FEMALE STARS1. Oprah Winfrey2. JK Rowling3. Martha Stewart4. Madonna5. Celine Dion6. Mariah Carey7. Janet Jackson8. Julia Roberts9. Jennifer Lopez10. Jennifer Aniston
Source: Forbes.com
However, the magazine omitted "non-working celebs" like Barbra Streisand "who essentially live off royalties" and "old Hollywood types" like Elizabeth Taylor.Among the other "active megastars" considered worthy of inclusion are Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson.

Julia Roberts is the highest-ranking actress in the list, her estimated net worth of $140m (£71m) earning her eight place in the rundown.Just below her at nine and ten lie Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston, both estimated to be worth $110m (£55.7m).
Twin sisters Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen - former child stars now at the helm of a highly successful retail empire - share 11th place.According to Forbes, its net worth estimates were based on total earnings over the course of a career, plus other assets where relevant.

History Of Motor

The inspiration for arguably the first motorcycle was designed and built by the German inventors Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in Bad Cannstatt (since 1905 a city district of Stuttgart) in 1885. The first petroleum-powered vehicle, it was essentially a motorised bicycle, although the inventors called their invention the Reitwagen ("riding car").However, if one counts two wheels with steam propulsion as being a motorcycle, then the first one may have been American. One such machine was demonstrated at fairs and circuses in the eastern U.S. in 1867, built by Sylvester Howard Roper of Roxbury, Massachusetts.In 1894, Hildebrand & Wolfmüller became the first motorcycle available for purchase. In the early period of motorcycle history, many producers of bicycles adapted their designs to accommodate the new internal combustion engine. As the engines became more powerful, and designs outgrew the bicycle origins, the number of motorcycle producers increased.

Until the First World War, the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world was Indian, producing over 20,000 bikes per year. By 1920, this honour went to Harley-Davidson, with their motorcycles being sold by dealers in 67 countries, until 1928 when DKW took over as the largest manufacturer.

After the Second World War, the BSA Group became the largest producer of motorcycles in the world, producing up to 75,000 bikes a year in the 1950s. The German company NSU Motorenwerke AG held the position of largest manufacturer from 1955 until the 1970s.From the 1960s through the 1990s, small two-stroke motorcycles were popular worldwide, partly as a result of East German Walter Kaaden's engine work in the 1950s.

Today, the Japanese manufacturers, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha dominate the motorcycle industry, although Harley-Davidson still maintains a high degree of popularity in the United States. Recent years have also seen a resurgence in the popularity of several other brands sold in the U.S. market, including BMW, KTM, Triumph, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi and Ducati.Outside of the USA, these brands have enjoyed continued and sustained success, although Triumph, for example, has been re-incarnated from its former self into a modern world-class manufacturer. In overall numbers, however, the Chinese currently manufacture and sell more motorcycles than any other country and exports are rising. The quality of these machines is asserted to be somewhat lower than their Japanese, European and American counterparts[citation needed].

Additionally, the small-capacity scooter is very popular through most of the world. The Piaggio group of Italy, for example, is one of the world's largest producers of two-wheeled vehicles. The scooter culture has, as yet, not been adopted widely in North America. (Wikipedia)

Richest woman

These days, just about any lip-smacking starlet can land a cable reality show or become YouTube's flavor of the week. But fame's 15 fleeting minutes can elapse quicker than it takes to refresh a Web page. Only a bona fide superstar can parlay a moment's stardom into a long and lucrative career. And even that's not enough to land a coveted spot on our first-ever listing of the 20 Richest Women in Entertainment. For that, you'd need a minimum net worth of $45 million.


To compile the list, we scoured the music, television, film and publishing industries to determine which female celebrities have, over the course of their careers, amassed the greatest fortunes in entertainment. We ruled out non-working celebs who essentially live off royalties (Barbra Streisand, for example), and we also excluded "old Hollywood" types like Elizabeth Taylor. The list is entirely confined to today's active megastars.

Of course, the celebrities with the longest careers proved the most daunting to evaluate. Since beginning her career in the early 1980s, Madonna has sold some 200 million albums worldwide and starred in a string of largely disappointing films. She owns an impressive portfolio of properties and briefly ran her own record label, Maverick, a part of Warner Music Group. Our estimate of her net worth--$325 million--is definitely on the conservative side.Indeed, most of the women on our list cull their earnings from multimedia enterprises. Jennifer Lopez, for example, boasts valuable perfume and fashion lines in addition to her film and music careers; Harry Potter scribe J.K. Rowling now enjoys millions of dollars in royalties and merchandising revenues from the incredibly successful film adaptations of her books; and supermodel Gisele Bundchen, a fixture of Victoria's Secret catalogs, earned her $70 million fortune not just from modeling, but also from a line of successful sandals sold in Brazil. The youngest women on the list? Twenty-year-old twins and former child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who have converted their supporting roles on a middling 1980s sitcom into a multimillion dollar retail empire called Dualstar Entertainment. The twins are often credited in the media as presiding over a fortune of as much as $1 billion. Not so. Despite Dualstar's retail sales of $1 billion, the waifish mini-moguls don't pocket all of it. We estimate their combined net worth at around $100 million.

Britney Spears, 25, also makes the list, despite a relatively brief career that took off only in 1999 with the release of her hit single "...Baby One More Time." Her $100 million fortune was earned largely from music--she has sold over 75 million albums to date--but she has supplemented her income with a profitable line of perfumes and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals.The richest actress on the list is Julia Roberts, who built her estimated $140 million fortune film by film. The Pretty Woman star was the first actress in Hollywood to command a $20 million-per-film paycheck, a fairly common salary for male superstars like Will Smith and Johnny Depp. Other actresses who make the list largely due to their film fees are Nicole Kidman and Cameron Diaz. Sandra Bullock, who checks in at No. 14 on the list, supplemented movie earnings by producing the ABC sitcom The George Lopez Show, which went into syndication last year.Martha Stewart is the only woman on the list whose net worth fluctuates just about every second. Her nearly $650 million fortune is based almost entirely on the 28 million shares she owns in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (nyse: MSO - news - people ). (In 2005, that stake was worth $1 billion.) Though her brief stint in prison forced her to relinquish the chief executive title, she still collects upwards of $2 million a year in salary and bonuses from the firm.Forbes' list of the 20 Richest Women in Entertainment is the subject of a one-hour special slated to air on the E! Entertainment Channel on Jan. 20. Check your local listings. (forbes)

Gold

Gold as an Investment

Gold price

The usual benchmark for the price of gold is known as the London Gold Fixing, a twice-daily (telephone) meeting of representatives from five bullion-trading firms. Furthermore, there is active gold trading based on the intra-day spot price, derived from gold-trading markets around the world as they open and close throughout the day.

Factors influencing the gold price

This ancient Egyptian golden bowl was buried in the tomb of a pharaoh and today sits in the British Museum. Gold items were often buried with pharaohs to use in the after-life, because gold is free from corrosion or decay.Today, like all investments and commodities, the price of gold is ultimately driven by supply and demand, including hoarding and dis-hoarding. Unlike most other commodities, the hoarding and dis-hoarding plays a much bigger role in affecting the price, because almost all the gold ever mined still exists and is potentially able to come on to the market at the right price.

Given the huge quantity of above-ground hoarded gold, compared to the annual production, the price of gold is mainly affected by changes in sentiment, rather than changes in annual production.

According to the World Gold Council, annual mine production of gold over the last few years has been close to 2,500 tonnes. About 3,000 tonnes goes into jewelry or industrial/dental production, and around 500 tonnes goes to retail investors and exchange traded gold funds. This translates to an annual demand for gold to be 1000 tonnes in excess over mine production which has come from central bank sales and other dishoarding. Demand from the electronics industry is rising by 11% a year, jewelry by 19%, and industrial and dental by 21%.Central banks and the International Monetary Fund play an important role in the gold price. At the end of 2004 central banks and official organizations held 19 percent of all above-ground gold as official gold reserves . The Washington Agreement on Gold (WAG), which dates from September 1999, limits gold sales by its members (Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund) to less than 400 tonnes a year . European central banks, such as the Bank of England and Swiss National Bank, have been key sellers of gold over this period .

Although central banks do not generally announce gold purchases in advance, some, such as Russia, have expressed interest in growing their gold reserves again as of late 2005 . In early 2006, China, which only holds 1.3% of its reserves in gold , announced that it was looking for ways to improve the returns on its official reserves. Many bulls hope that this signals that China might reposition more of its holdings into gold in line with other Central Banks.

In general, gold becomes more desirable in times of:

- Bank failures

When dollars were fully convertible into gold, both were regarded as money. However, most people preferred to carry around paper banknotes rather than the somewhat heavier and less divisible gold coins. If people feared their bank would fail, a bank run might have been the result. This is what happened in the USA during the Great Depression of the 1930s, leading President Roosevelt to impose a national emergency and to outlaw the holding of gold by US citizens.

- Low or negative real interest rates

If the return on other asset classes is not adequately compensating for risk and inflation, the demand for gold increases.l. A prime example of this is the period of Stagflation that occurred during the 1970s and which led to an economic bubble forming in precious metals.

- War, invasion, looting, crisisIn times of national crisis, people fear that their assets may be seized and that the currency may become worthless. They see gold as a solid asset which will always buy food or transportation. Thus in times of great uncertainty, particularly when war is feared, the demand for gold rises.