Even better than expected economic data in the US didn't seem to register and Wall Street was in fact sharply lower during the last hours of London trading.With so many corporate results out yesterday, speculative investors were kept busy trying to identify other companies that may be victims or winners as a result of the trends identified in results statements. Demand for the shares has pushed Man Group into the FTSE 100 with a stock price up more than 200 per cent since the start of the decade.Dealers focused on individual company stories yesterday rather than the wider direction of the market, which drifted higher, then lower, and then settled with the FTSE 100 at 4,198, off 8.4 points. The broker also believes that April-June was a record quarter for inflows into hedge funds.Man shares rose 17p to 1,227p because the Morgan Stanley research found that the company has 7 per cent of the fund of funds market, making it the biggest player.Stanley Fink, chief executive, has cast himself as an apostle of the benefits of hedge funds for diversifying an investment portfolio. Shares in Man Group, the hedge fund manager, jumped yesterday after new research suggested it was winning market share in the booming "fund of funds" market. A study by Morgan Stanley suggested that funds of funds are the preferred way for new investors - both high net worth individuals and first time institutional investors - to get exposure to hedge funds, and as such are driving the current growth of the industry.
WH Smith isn't yet a company in crisis, not withstanding the profits warning, but Ms Swann needs a free hand if she's to prevent it becoming so.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk. WH Smith needs fresh thinking, and hopefully she'll provide it. A slight disadvantage is that Mr Handover isn't entirely going He remains as chairman, at least for the next 18 months. The expansion into hotel and airport lounges in the US has been a largely predictable failure, with September 11 and SARs providing the final coup de grace.The one saving grace has been the core UK retailing business, where perhaps remarkably, profits have been on a rising trend Now this business too seems to be turning sour. Then there was the attempt to sell the newspaper distribution business, which seemed logical enough but fell by the wayside when the company failed to fetch the reserve price.
Strategies have been and gone, but nothing much has ever come of them. First there was the "clicks and bricks" initiative, the mere suggestion of which during the heady days of the dot boom was enough to drive the share price up to a record high of £7.Yet it always was a somewhat confused response to the challenge of the internet age, and it wasn't hard to forget that this staid old high street retailer had an online strategy at all once the excitement of the e-commerce revolution began to wane. It's an awful thing to say, but it would have been cheaper to pay the hush money.WH SmithNo chief executive likes to bow out with a profits warning, yet that is the fate that has befallen Richard Handover at WH Smith. All in all, it's been an extraordinarily unremarkable reign, so in a sense, this seems an appropriate end. It will be months before the case comes to court and Mr Smith gets a proper chance to clear the air In the meantime the share price continues to plummet.
