Financial literacy course for young adults launched
A financial literacy programme for young adults was jointly launched by Citi Singapore and SMU yesterday. The Citi-SMU programme, set to commence in 2013, aims to equip people between 17 and 30 with personal financial knowledge and skills appropriate to their life stage, forming a foundation for better money management. Participants can look forward to lectures and workshops by Citi guest speakers, as well as training sessions by SMU faculty members and select SMU students. Professor De Meyer said “with the new financial literacy programme, our students can also use what they have learnt, to reach out to the young adult community in Singapore, with the focus of reaching those with lower income.”

Do markets really rise in January?
The stock market's rise of over 5 per cent so far this year has once again led investors to talk about the so-called Capricorn effect, otherwise known as the January effect, which claims that stocks tend to rise in the month of January. Dr Benedict Koh, Professor of Finance at the SMU said that the January effect was not present from 1988 to last year and found the market to have fallen in January for 13 of the 24 years investigated. He said that as more investors became aware of the Capricorn effect, they tried to profit from this anomaly by buying stocks in December and selling them at the end of January. And as more investors jumped onto the bandwagon, their actions caused the Capricorn effect to peter out over the years. Given the lack of evidence of the January effect in the last 24 years, the rise in the Straits Times Index in the first few days of January was due primarily to positive economic news coming out of the US and China.