Image of the week: Tough trades
The New York Stock Exchange floor is a festival of facial expressions, even if many of them represent the different stages of "oh, no, there's a news agency photographer taking pictures of us again". The trader on the left is giving his best "pensive and weary", while the trader on the right is "win-some-lose-some sanguine". This picture was taken on Monday, before Tuesday's rally, but either way Economic Uncertainty and its more troublesome cousin Global Anxiety have been stalking equities markets to date in 2016, and there's not much sign of a sustained let up.
Photograph: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg
In Numbers: Hotel Chocolat
33
Percentage rise in the share price of Hotel Chocolat as it made its London stock market debut on Tuesday. We could have predicted this, to be honest.
£223 million
Valuation that this sweet surge gave the company, which has a shop in Belfast but, inexplicably, is not to be found in the Republic of Ireland – yet.
84
Number of shops and shop/cafes in the Hotel Chocolat empire. The luxury chocolate company has looked at expanding into Dublin before, and we very much hope they do so again.
The Lexicon: BYOT
BYOT stands for Bring Your Own Team and it's all the rage at Stripe, the payments company founded by Ireland's Collison brothers. It is now inviting ready- made teams of two to five people to apply for jobs at Stripe – by sending in details of each individual's CV as well as the history of their past collaborations. It expects the applicants will mainly be software engineers, but would "love to see well-established collaborations between engineers and designers, managers or product managers". Then it's onto the group interview (only you're not competing against each other) and if an offer is made, it goes out to everyone. "The industry has always focused on hiring atoms; we'd like to try hiring molecules,"says Stripe. Interested molecules can find more information at Stripe.com.
Getting to know: Cassandra Stavrou
Londoner Cassandra Stavrou, aka the "Queen of Popcorn" (according to the Daily Mail), always wanted to start a business. When she did, she chose "poshcorn", as the exploding market for hipster popcorn is now known. Stavrou began Propercorn with savings of £10,000, business partner Ryan Kohn and a cement mixer (for tumbling the popcorn, apparently). Doubters told her she should ask for her old job back, but Propercorn has now spread from being stocked in Google offices to being available in some 15,000 retailers. And Stavrou (32) is picking up awards for her eclectically flavoured efforts. Propercorn and its rivals are finding rich rewards in the "anything is healthier than crisps" snack category.
The list: Straight-up countries
Afghanistan and Nigeria are "fantastically corrupt" and "possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world", David Cameron was recorded declaring this week. Transparency International, which published its annual corruption perception index in January, picks out Somalia and North Korea for special attention. But which countries does it judge the least corrupt? (Hint: it's not Ireland.)
5 Netherlands and Norway The joint fifth least corrupt countries in 2015, according to Transparency International. They didn’t qualify for Euro 2016 though, did they?
4 New Zealand No scandals here – except the Panama Papers, but that’s everywhere.
3 Sweden The Eurovision hosts are wonderfully clean – or at least they were. Since coming third in Transparency International’s latest index, there has been a string of investigations into alleged corporate skulduggery.
2 Finland A former poll-topper.
1 Denmark Our trip round northern Europe, with a quick diversion to New Zealand, ends the only way it can. Denmark scored 91 out of 100 from Transparency International, which is an A1.
