6A-Identifying opportunities in economic & regulatory trends

Economic trends:

1. (a) The first economic trend that I found is more related to financial economics and corporate governance. Since I am a graduating exchange student, I recently wrote my bachelor thesis on board gender diversity and their impact on financial performance. In my research paper I conducted statistical analyses with a large scale dataset of US firms and found that gender diversity in board of directors leads to increased financial performance.

(b) The fact that independent boards perform better led me to study this phenomenon

(c) The most likely customer are firms which benefit from improved corporate governance.

(d) The opportunity is difficult to exploit, since first, the people (female directors) with the right qualification has been found.

I saw this opportunity because I have been developing an extensive dataset on gender diversity, and therefore, because of my major in finance. (educational background). Moreover, I am generally a very open-minded person, who is looking to find out new things.

2. (a) Stock markets are becoming more volatile.I observed this phenomena when I was looking at the dow jones and DAX in october 2018. Moreover, several practitioners such as employees of the bank Berenberg which i visited in December 2018 gave further evidence on their losses that arised because of this volatitlity

(b) The opportunity for financial options arises, since they benefit from huge fluctuations in the stock market.

(c) Investment banks, hedge funds, equity traders

(d) It is relatively hard to benefit from this opportunity since you need an in-depth knowledge of stock trading.

I saw this opportunity because I am interested in equity trading. Hence, my desire to invest in stocks helped me.

Regulatory trends:

1.(a) Minimum wages are increased. This is one of the recent regulatory trends in Germany. Evidence for it is that it is actually enforced for all people over 18.

(b) The opportunity here is that people who beforehand did not earn enough money to support themselves, will now reap the benefits.

(c) Low earning workers

(d) It is easy to benefit, if you are a low earning individual.


1.(a) The adaption of apple pay in Germany. This was spread all over the news in December 2018.

(b) The opportunity is for shops to offer more easy payment systems for customers.

(c) Tech savvy shoppers

(d) very easy, since you just need an Apple device that works.