Guide to Analysing Companies

Variable rate
A rate of interest that varies in line with some bench-
mark. (See also floating rate.)
V
VARIABLE RATE
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Venture capital
See private equity.
Virtual enterprise
An enterprise that is hard to kick, one with few tangible assets.
A company that transacts most of its business electronically and
which subcontracts (see outsourcing) almost anything that
requires the use of fixed assets. The virtual company creates the
semblance of a huge enterprise yet has control over few re-
sources. Although this helps to keep costs down, it does not nec-
essarily lead to profits. The most successful virtual enterprises
are those whose chief assets are their intellectual property (for
example, a designer of semiconductor chips). 
Volatility
Large and frequent fluctuations in the price of a security,
commodity, average or index, sometimes caused by a thin
or narrow market or a lack of liquidity. One way to measure
volatility is to study something called a beta coefficient. This
shows how volatile a financial instrument is compared
with its respective baseline – for example, the s&p 500 stock
index. The index itself has a beta coefficient of one, so any-
thing greater than that is more volatile than the market as a
whole.
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Ww
Wall Street Journal
The most successful US business newspaper; a daily that is
owned by the Dow Jones Company, which also gave its name
to the main index of the new york stock exchange. The
Wall Street Journal is one of the few US newspapers to be truly
national. In recent years, it has also spread its wings interna-
tionally, launching the 
Asian Wall Street Journal and the Wall
Street Journal Europe. Like most of its competitors, it also offers
readers an online service.
Warehousing
Disguising the purchase of shares in a company by using
nominees to buy them. The purpose may be to enable the
nominees to act in concert and make a surprise takeover bid
for the company. Many countries try to reduce the chances of
this happening by regulating the behaviour of concert