Do Emotions Benefit Investment Decisions? Anticipatory Emotion and Investment Decisions in Non-professional Investors

Increasing financial trading performance is big business. A lingering question within academia and industry concerns whether emotions improve or degrade trading performance. In this study, 30 participants distributed hypothetical wealth between a share (a risk) and the bank (paying a small, sure, gain) within four trading games. Skin Conductance Response was measured while playing the games to measure anticipatory emotion, a covert emotion signal that impacts decision-making. Anticipatory emotion was significantly associated with trading performance but the direction of the correlation was dependent upon the share’s movement. Thus, anticipatory emotion is neither wholly “good” nor “bad” for trading; instead, the relationship is context-dependent. This is one of the first studies exploring the association between anticipatory emotion and trading behaviour using trading games within an experimentally rigorous environment. Our findings elucidate the relationship between anticipatory emotion and financial decision-making and have applications for improving trading performance in novice and expert traders.

Big Business and Cadre Management in China

Leading cadres in China are subject to rotation. An interesting form of rotation takes place between big business and the political world. That means one fifth of China’s governors and vice governors have a business background as heads of one of China’s large State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). How this takes place and which qualifications the involved business leaders possess are shrouded in mystery. Based on prosopographical studies of Chinese business leaders who have participated in the Chinese Executive Leadership Program (CELP), this article attempts to open the black box. The study examines the career pathways of CELP participants in Party, government and business positions. The study shows that 84 of the 261 CELP SOE participants (2005-2018) were subsequently promoted, and 20 of these promotions were from SOEs to leading Party and government positions. In some cases, former business leaders became Party secretaries in important provinces or ministers in key ministries. The article also argues that Chinese business leaders have managed to keep their administrative ranking in the Chinese nomenklatura system. In fact, Chinese business leaders are quasi officials (zhun guan) and form an important recruitment base for leadership renewal. As such, the article suggests that the rotation of cadres within the ‘Iron Triangle’ of Party–government–business constitutes the main unifying and stabilising factor in the Chinese political system.

Regime-sanctioned oligarchs

No oligarchic system, similar to those in Ukraine or Russia, developed in Belarus after 1991, but the formation of a group of prominent regime-linked businessmen has accelerated in recent years. They owe their influence to informal concessions from the regime to do business in selected sectors of the economy. They often do not take over state property but act as intermediaries, earning a hefty commission for doing so. They also operate in the criminal sphere, primarily involving the large-scale smuggling of goods into Russia and the European Union. This article aims to show the evolution and specifics of big business in Belarus. The growing capital potential of big Belarusian businessmen, estimated at a dozen or so, and their rising influence on the economic decisions made by the authorities while maintaining total political loyalty, make it justified to call at least some of them oligarchs. The system emerging in Belarus bears certain similarities to some post-Soviet oligarchic systems while having its own distinctive features. The accumulated capital and contacts give at least some of the emerging Belarusian oligarchs a good starting position for taking a front seat in a possible future political transformation, should the conditions arise for that to begin.

Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy

Russia experienced both economic and geopolitical expansion in the 2000s. During this time, the Kremlin and big business worked in tandem to assert Russian influence in post-Soviet space. However, the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s involvement in the war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 marked a new period that severed the state’s geopolitical strategy and the interests of big capital. While the state continues to engage in open and covert military action, the activity of Russian business abroad has sharply diminished. Relying on David Harvey’s concepts of territorial and capitalist logics of power, the article explores the interplay between political and economic imperialism during Putin’s 20 years in power and situates Russia within today’s global imperialist landscape. I find that the Kremlin’s geopolitical and geoeconomic shift in 2014 can ultimately be explained by the strategic orientation of the country’s leadership, in particular, the deeply ingrained emphasis on security and ‘hard power’. However, the turn away from economic imperialism was also structurally determined by the exhaustion of the country’s economic engine that no longer generates surplus capital in need of a ‘spatial fix’.

The adaptability of Monday.com’s app-based software: Discover the company building a flexible business model that adapts to individual company needs

The tools of running a business are big business themselves. Finding a way to efficiently streamline processes could save time, effort, and money, but getting to that point often requires retraining and fitting the process to the software rather than the software to the process. Having an all-in-one platform that adapts to business needs is the novel way some companies have begun to approach productivity tools, with Monday.com being a prime example of where the technology is leading. An easy-to-use interface depends on the user’s ability to grasp its setup, and by making an app-based platform, the founders are capitalizing on the iPhone generation. Monday.com is a prime example of a business offering a product for other businesses, and studying how they developed their software not only allows students to understand how such a tool can be useful in running a business, but also the innovative process behind creating a whole new way to do business.