The alternative investment market (AIM) has seen rapid growth over its 19 years, and has emerged as the market of choice for smaller, newer companies, both in the UK and abroad. However, it has often had a volatile reputation among investors, who have commonly perceived stock in the AIM as more risky than the main market. In this book, a group of leading financial analysts conduct an extensive empirical study to compare the relative volatility of two UK equity markets run by the London Stock Exchange, over a ten year period. They analyse the comparative risks involved in the alternative investment market, the market of growing companies, and the 'main market', the market for more established companies. This book analyses the volatility of the alternative investment market, using a variety of techniques and approaches. It compares the volatility of stocks in the markets, exploring variables such as size, industry, age and market switches. Using refined methods to focus on the difference between the markets, the authors provide a convincing study to challenge the idea that the alternative investment market is higher risk than the main market.

This is the first major treatment of the effects of increased transparency on financial markets: an important and highly controversial issue for both traders and regulators. Focussing on three main themes - market transparency, the consolidation-fragmentation of trading systems, and the scope of regulation (i.e. which markets, and which traders within those markets, should be subject to regulation), the book highlights the importance of these issues to all markets throughout the world. The authors draws on research from eight UK-based investment exchanges, Deutsche Borse in Frankfurt, and documentary evidence from the US markets and their regulators.

This volume is a record of the Workshop on Graphics and Communications organized within ESPRIT II Project 2463 ARGOSI (Applications Related Graphics and OSI Standards Integration). The workshop was included in the Eurographics workshop programme for 1990. The ARGOSI project essentially arose from the observation that international standards in the graphics and networking areas were generally being developed in isolation and that insufficient attention was being paid to the needs of applications whose requirements spanned several standards. The importance of the integration of graphics and networking has been growing over recent years, with the growth of interest in multi-media systems to support cooperative working, and the use of computer graphics techniques in the visualization of the results of scientific and engineering computations. The latter frequently involve high-speed links between workstations and supercomputers. The presentations in this volume cover a broad range of activities from a classification scheme for graphics and networking to interconnection experiments with broadband networks. Three topics were selected for detailed discussion in working groups: - Improvements to the computer graphics metafile standard, - The role of application profiles in graphics data exchange, - The impact of multi-media. The volume contains a record of the discussions and the recommendations from the working groups, subsequently endorsed by the workshop.

This is the first major treatment of the effects of increased transparency on financial markets: an important and highly controversial issue for both traders and regulators. Focussing on three main themes - market transparency, the consolidation-fragmentation of trading systems, and the scope of regulation (i.e. which markets, and which traders within those markets, should be subject to regulation), the book highlights the importance of these issues to all markets throughout the world. The book draws on research from eight UK based investment exchanges, Deutsche Borse in Frankfurt and documentary evidence from the US markets and their regulators enabling the identification and documentation of the current situation and consideration of what fresh regulatory approaches are required for this new and fast evolving situation.

The offices of GMD-FOKUS in Berlin provided the venue for a meeting in December 1987 which signalled the birth of the ARGOSI project. The proposal gradually took shape over the following months, and after merging with another project proposal in the field of standardization of computer graphics, finally received funding from the Esprit programme in March 1989. The project stemmed from a recognition of the importance of computer graphics a'i an ena bling technology in many application areas, and of the need to build bridges between computer graphics and telecommunications. The overall aims of the pro ject were twofold: * Advance the state of the art in the transfer of graphical information across international networks. * Improve quality and applicability of standards in this area. This book records the key results of the project and the contributions the project has made to standardization related to the transfer of graphical information across open networks. Contributions have included a demonstration of a prototype appli cation - a road transport information system running over public international of a new data networks - shown at the Esprit '91 exhibition, the standardization FT AM document type allowing structured access to graphical information (represented according to the Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) standard) and major contributions to a mapping of the X-Windows protocol onto an OSI stack. The project also organized two international workshops. the first on Graphics and Communications, and the second on Distributed Window Systems.