【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障7系列】【7-12】经管

spencerX

【速度】


【速度一】

Downturn in China spreads to key sectors

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China's downturn is spreading to the sectors and companies that were expected to withstand the slowdown and drive growth in the region.

Financial Times analysis shows that a third of publicly listed Chinese companies suffered cash outflows in the quarter to the end of June as the combined effect of the slowdown in exports, a build-up in stocks and tightening local government finances begins to bite.

Cash balances at a tenth of 1,700 companies analysed by the FT using data from S& Capital IQ have turned negative in the past two quarters.

For a further 6 per cent of companies that normally report an outflow, the outflows were worse than last year.

The results highlight that even the companies that are expected to help rebalance China away from an investment-driven economy -- such as consumer and retail businesses, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and electronics companies -- are being affected by the slowdown, along with construction, real estate, industrial machinery and chemicals.

Increasing numbers of hedge funds and analysts are looking closely at cash flow data as sustained poor cash flows would have a big impact on companies' ability to service their debt and hence on the health of China's banking sector.

There are some signs that the cash crunch has already been felt by banks during the first half of the year.

While non-performing loans grew by just 1 per cent across the sector, overdue loans leapt by 29 per cent, according to Mike Werner of Bernstein Research in Hong Kong.

Among the 574 companies with negative cash flow from operating activities in the FT analysis, the results of 175 -- or 30 per cent -- appeared to be non-seasonal because patterns over the past two quarters were completely different from those seen in the periods a year before.

Another 18 per cent showed some seasonal similarity with last year, but their results were worse over the first half of this year. Sixty-nine of the 574 had negative cash flow for both of the past two quarters.

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【速度二】

How to Find Weeds in a Mortgage Pool

IT sounds like the Domesday Book of the housing bust. In fact, it is a computerized compendium of millions of housing transactions — a decade’s worth from across the country — that could finally help us get to the bottom of troubled mortgage investments.

The system is an outgrowth of work done by a New York investment manager, Thomas Priore. In the boom years, his investment firm, ICP Capital, navigated the dangerous waters of collateralized debt obligations via an investment vehicle called Triaxx. Buyers of Triaxx C.D.O.’s did better than most, but Triaxx still incurred losses when the bottom fell out.

Now Triaxx’s database could help its managers and other investors identify bad mortgages and, perhaps, learn who snookered whom when questionable home loans were bundled into investments that later went bad.

Triaxx’s technology came to light only last month, in court documents filed in connection with the bankruptcy of Residential Capital. ResCap was the mortgage lending unit of GMAC, now known as Ally Financial. As an investor in mortgage securities, Triaxx gained access to a lot of information about loans that were pooled, including when those loans were made, where the properties are and how big the mortgage was, relative to the property’s value. After Triaxx fed such details into its system, dubious loans popped out.

Granted, Mr. Priore is no stranger to controversy. He and ICP spent two years defending themselves against a lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused them of improperly generating “tens of millions of dollars in fees and undisclosed profits at the expense of clients and investors.” On Friday, ICP and Mr. Priore settled the matter. As is typical in such cases, they neither admitted nor denied the accusations. Mr. Priore paid $1.5 million. He declined to discuss the settlement.

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【速度三】

But he did say that, looking ahead, he believed that Triaxx’s technology would help its investors recover money they deserved. Many other investors, unable or unwilling to dig through such data, have settled for pennies on the dollar.

“Our hope is that the technology will level the playing field for mortgage-backed investors and provide a superior method to manage residential mortgage risk in the future,” Mr. Priore said.
A step in that direction is Triaxx’s recent objection to a proposed settlement struck last May between ResCap and a group of large mortgage investors. Triaxx, which invested in mortgage loans originated by ResCap, criticized that settlement because it was based in part on estimated losses. Triaxx said the estimates had assumed that all the trusts that invested in ResCap paper were the same. Triaxx argued that a settlement based on estimated losses, rather than one based on an analysis of actual misrepresentations, unfairly rewards investors who bought ResCap’s riskier mortgages.

ResCap replied that it would be a herculean task to examine the loans in the trusts to determine the validity of each investor’s claims. But Triaxx noted that it took only seven weeks or so to do a forensic analysis of the roughly 20,000 loans held by the trusts in which it is an investor. Of its investments in loans with an original balance of $12.8 billion, Triaxx has identified approximately $2.17 billion with likely breaches. A lawyer for ResCap did not return a phone call on Friday seeking comment about problem loans.

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【速度四】

John G. Moon, a lawyer at Miller & Wrubel who represents Mr. Priore’s firm, said: “Large institutions have been able to hide behind the expense of loan file review to evade responsibility for this very important national problem that we now have. Using years of data and cross-referencing it, Triaxx has figured out where the bad loans are.”

Triaxx, for example, said it had found loans that probably involved inflated appraisals. Those appraisals led to mortgages far exceeding the values of the underlying properties. As a result, investors who thought they were buying mortgages that didn’t exceed 80 percent of the properties’ value were instead buying highly risky loans that totaled well over 100 percent of the value.

Triaxx identifies these loans by analyzing 50 property sales in the same vicinity during the same period that the original mortgage was given. Then it compares the specific mortgage to 10 others that are most similar. The comparable transactions must involve the same type of property — a single-family home, for example — of roughly the same size. They must also be within a 5.5-mile radius. If the appraisal appears excessive, the system flags it.

Phony appraisals in its ResCap loans likely resulted in $1.29 billion in breaches, Triaxx told the court. Triaxx cited 50 possible cases; one involved a mortgage written in November 2006 on a home in Miami. It was a 1,036-square-foot single-family residence, and was appraised at $495,000. That appraisal supported a $396,000 mortgage, reflecting a relatively conservative 80 percent loan-to-value ratio.

But an analysis of 10 similar sales around that time suggested that the property was actually worth about $279,000. If that was indeed the case, that $396,000 mortgage represented a 142 percent loan-to-value ratio.

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【速度五】

Perhaps the home had gold-plated bathroom fixtures and diamond-encrusted appliances. Probably not.

Triaxx’s system also points to loans on properties that were not owner-occupied, a breach of what investors were told would be in the pool when they bought it, Triaxx’s filing said. Such misrepresentations in loans underwritten by ResCap amounted to $352 million, Triaxx said.

The technology also kicks out mortgages on which borrowers failed to make even their first payments, loans that should never have wound up in the pools to begin with.

Although Triaxx is using its technology to try to recover losses, that system could also help investors looking to buy privately issued mortgage securities. After all, investors’ inability to analyze the loans in these pools during the mania led to enormous losses in the collapse. Now, deeply mistrustful of such securities, investors have pretty much abandoned the market.

Lenders and packagers of mortgage securities will undoubtedly fight the use of any technology like Triaxx’s to identify questionable loans. That battle will be interesting to watch. But investors should certainly welcome anything that brings transparency to this dysfunctional market.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 9, 2012, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Find Weeds in A Mortgage Pool

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【越障】

Four Things to Get Right When Starting a Company
by Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery

Most VCs and entrepreneurs believe start-ups are inherently iterative, that a string of mistakes doesn't prevent success, but may even be the path to it. Generally, that view is correct, but there are a few choices made early on that have implications so deep as to be functionally irreversible, with profound implications for outcomes. Product and business models are evolutionary by nature, but we see four things a young company must get right:

?The founding team
?The core values
?Where the company is located
?The initial investors (and their terms)

A good company usually begins with co-founders: the notion of a lone Edison willing a giant company into existence is rarely correct. Almost all successful start-ups have multiple founders, from the Central Pacific's Big 4 to Google's Brin and Page. Simply finding a co-founder serves as a critical exercise in validation. Co-founders also bring diversity of talent and high dedication, and mitigate the loneliness and stress of life at a young company. And only a strong co-founder has both the perspective and authority to challenge another co-founder's ideas, helping a company remain an intellectually honest enterprise rather than devolving into theocracy (compare Shockley vs. Intel, e.g.). Moving forward without a co-founder is risky and moving on with a bad co-founder almost unimaginably costly.

It's also important to cultivate a balanced team from the start. Unbalanced teams grow more so over time, as like hires like, resulting in an operation with lopsided competencies. In technology companies, engineering talent needs the balance of a business and operations team. Unfortunately, it can be hard to persuade different camps of their mutual necessity. Engineering departments fetishize the theory that if you build a better mousetrap, the rest takes care of itself. The business side has its own misconceptions, including the idea that a great salesman can peddle any idea, no matter how bad. In reality, both sides of the company should be built concurrently. With the possible exception of Google from 1998-2000, an extraordinary product, absent a strong business vision early on, is not enough (e.g., most of Nicolai Tesla's inventions; Web 1.0; Twitter 2006-2011) and vice versa (e.g., Crystal Pepsi; MySpace 2003-2007). Bill Gates and Paul Allen represent the acme of pure engineering, but they were business hustlers from the start — right down to their first product, which they sold before it even existed.

As the early team comes together, it has a short-lived opportunity to decide how it wants to do business, because culture entrenches at compound rates with each new hire - somewhere after two dozen employees, culture tends to cement. Although "culture" gets dismissed because of what large PR departments do with the term, corporate culture (or values, or philosophy - the label's irrelevant) really does matter. A set of genuine values makes life much more efficient. Start-ups get complex quickly and having a coherent philosophy reduces cognitive load and improves results. ZocDoc has core principles that allow it to quickly evaluate any proposal, creating a coherent consumer experience and happier company; Facebook's "focus on impact" steered it in a much more ambitious and successful direction than its competitors. Assessing philosophical compatibility allows you to shut down many analytical branches without effort ("this is not who we are, let's move on"), rather than analyzing each new decision from first principles. Companies that do not appear to have strong core philosophies, or that abandon them, tend to wander — Apple under Sculley and H-P post-Platt, for examples. Your philosophy is your corporate constitution and one of the most valuable pieces of IP you'll create.

Geography is another important factor; pets, spouses, and houses scale with each hire, and just as with culture, each new employee makes things more permanent. All industries have their own foci and there's no reason not to head there immediately.

Good location also makes funding easier — VCs, for instance, like the option of visiting their investments regularly and tend not to fund things far from their offices — and an entrenched entrepreneurial culture makes recruiting more effective. Even fifty miles can make a difference: the start-up culture around Stanford is vastly more developed than around UC Berkeley, much more disparate than the quality differential of their engineering departments would suggest.

Finally, your early money comes with terms and conditions that serve as defaults for many financings to come. Many companies succumb to the richest valuation from the quickest checkbook they can find. But first money often comes with board representation, and early board members cannot be easily dislodged. Investors who are not aligned with the vision of the company, who push for early exits or a carousel of CEOs, destroy value relentlessly. And other terms from early financings also can be imprisoning; voting is a particularly difficult to subsequently revise in the company's favor.

Entrepreneurs must reserve time in the early life of a business to be reflective. There is enormous pressure to do things, to the exclusion of thoughtfulness; quietly thinking about values or board representation seems useless when there's so much product to be developed. But for most things, the future provides ample time to correct mistakes and a quick cycle of failure and improvement serves the company well. Other decisions are, unfortunately, more permanent.

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fightfor700

2:102:33
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7:23
不在状态，有点儿困和晕…………

miffyhui

1’19”
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速度难，没怎么看懂~越障只能以后来读了！

风随心动01

2:37
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今天明显不在状态
速度第二篇对我来说蛮难的，[Time 3]开始就看不懂了，为了不回视只能勉强看下去，看完也是云里雾里的，晚上好好睡一觉，明天起来再试一遍~
………………………………………………………天亮了………………………………………………………………………………………………
越障
10:50
The four things to get right for starting acompany
Co-founder team and a balanced team wouldbe better to start a company.
The company culture is important.
A better location would help a lot and thenew company should choose a suitable palce.
A good investor will provide enough moneyfor operation.

puffywhite

01'50
01'55
01'31
01'40
01'10

obstacle :07'59
the passage mainly disguess about four things that should be noticed when first establish a company, including  founders, core values,location and the initial investors. And in order to reinforce the point of view, the author provide us some detailed information.
firstly, he talks about the founders and argues that multifounders instead of solefounder will help the company more because of the
conhension and stress-relieved function.
secondly,he talks about the importance of the balance of a team. In his opinion, a company should develop in multiple dimension rather
than focus on just one point. he also provides us some exceptions including Google and Apple.
thirdly,the author rules out that core value plays a pivotal role in company developing and provides some drawbacks of lacking such core
values.
fourly, the significance of the location has been pointed out. on one hand, a convinent location will be beneficial to a company's long-term
development, on the other, location will influence the investors' decision.
last but not the least, the author concludes that the attributes and characteristics of the initial investors are of great significance because it is difficult to dislodge a early and the investor may have the power to destory values .

cocoobear

快断网啦 只读了第一篇1‘00 还差八行

ynayumi

1'56
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Obstacles 4'34
1 4 key factor when establishing a company:team,core value,location and money
2 why we should have a team
3 a team should be balanced in different aspects,ie google and microsoft
4 location:affect many thing,the most important is funding
5 funding:where to get and what problems may occur
6 conclusion(基本忘记是什么)：time will make things right之类

garyliu

这是我第一次在看完一些方法帖子之后做练习，没有计时，但感觉比以前迷失在细节和生词时要快许多。
speed
1. Chinese companies suffered cash outflows negative balance sheet. Some signs of short of cash flow.
2. Triaxx, which is developed by investigating CDO, helps to find out bad mortgages.
3. Triaxx objects a settlement which is based on estimated losses.
4. Triaxx analyzes many cases in the same time and place, and finds the overestimated ones.
5. Battles between triaxx and lenders are just beginning.
第二篇专业知识不少，interesting and informing 。
obstacle 4 things needed to start a business.
1. cofounders : various talents
2. core value : company culture
3. geography : funding and many realistic things
4. initial investment : help to get things doneconclusion: give it a thoughtful consideration and well preparation

Maykey

1'44
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今天特地放慢速度，理解

我心匪席

2’15
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6‘50
Start-ups are inherently iterative, that a string of mistakes doesn’t prevent success. But there are four things a young company must get right: the founding team, the core values, the location and the initial investors.

1) Successful start-ups usually have multiple founders. A balanced team is important for a start-up.

2) Core values for start-up team can make team more efficient.

3) Location can attract funding.

4) Early money comes with terms and conditions that serve as defaults for many financings to come.

Entrepreneurs must reserve time in the early life of a business to be reflective.

今天速度很慢，好困~
感谢楼主分享~