Portfolio and Security Analysis Commons^™

The Broken Buck Stops Here: Embracing Sponsor Support In Money Market Fund Reform, Jill E. Fisch

Faculty Scholarship

Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman bankruptcy contributed to a freeze in the credit markets. In response, MMFs were deemed a component of the nefarious shadow banking industry and targeted for regulatory reform. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) misguided 2014 reforms responded by potentially exacerbating MMF fragility while potentially crippling large segments of the MMF industry.

Determining ...

How Do Bond Specific, Firm Specific And Macroeconomic Factors Influence Corporate Credit Spreads?, Michael Mayberger

Honors Projects

The recession of 2008-2009 showcased the critical role that the corporate bond market plays in providing firms with access to capital, a role reflected by a 300% increase in corporate bonds issued from $600 billion issued in 2007 to $1.8 trillion issued in 2012. In this study, I investigate the bond specific, firm specific and macroeconomic factors that explain the change in corporate credit spreads within the Consumer Staples industry between 2005 and 2013. The results show that the firm specific variables, debt and total assets, have the largest impact on the corporate credit spreads. However, there is a ...

Impact Of The Financial Crisis On Derivative Valuation, Samuel M. Berklacich

Finance Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Indefinite Knapsack Separable Quadratic Programming: Methods And Applications, Jaehwan Jeong

Doctoral Dissertations

Quadratic programming (QP) has received significant consideration due to an extensive list of applications. Although polynomial time algorithms for the convex case have been developed, the solution of large scale QPs is challenging due to the computer memory and speed limitations. Moreover, if the QP is nonconvex or includes integer variables, the problem is NP-hard. Therefore, no known algorithm can solve such QPs efficiently. Alternatively, row-aggregation and diagonalization techniques have been developed to solve QP by a sub-problem, knapsack separable QP (KSQP), which has a separable objective function and is constrained by a single knapsack linear constraint and box constraints ...

Impact Of The Financial Crisis On Derivative Valuation, Samuel M. Berklacich

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Tracking Errors Of Exchange Traded Funds And Index Funds, Rupendra Paliwal

WCOB Working Papers

Exchange traded funds (ETF) are one of the recent financial innovations widely viewed as significantly better investments than mutual funds given their lower fee structure and tax efficiency. Individual investors are increasingly using ETFs tracking most popular stock indices to achieve their investment goals. In some cases, investors are using these ETFs to replace index mutual funds in their long-term portfolios. Thus, it is important to compare the performance of widely held ETFs and index funds in terms of their ability to consistently track the underlying index. Another interesting research question is whether tracking errors of these two investment vehicles ...

Trading Intraday Volatility, Treavor Dodsworth

Honors Program Projects

Many people believe that there is no way to profit off of anomalies in the markets because the markets are either completely random or they always accurately reflect outside information and events. Others, however, believe that models can be found through historical testing that successfully beat the market (Williams, 2011, p. 13-15). This thesis presents a method for beating the market by trading intraday volatility. The researcher focused on trading corn futures contracts. A futures contract is simply a derivative that can be bought and sold. It represents an agreement to buy or sell at a future date. Futures contracts ...

Corporate Social Performance, Analyst Stock Recommendations, And Firm Future Returns, Xueming Luo, Heli Wang, Sascha Raithel, Qinqin Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study posits that security analysts heed corporate social performance information and factor it into their recommendations to general investors. In particular, as corporate social performance is often uncertain and ambiguous to general investors, analysts may serve as the informational pathway connecting corporate social performance to firm stock returns. Thus, we argue that analyst recommendations mediate the relationship between corporate social performance and firm stock returns. On the basis of not only a qualitative study with literature searches and interviews of stock analysts but also a quantitative study with two longitudinal samples of large firms, we find support for these ...

Be Smart: Focus On Processes And Diversify, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Hedge fund managers have plenty to think about today as China transitions to a consumption-driven economy, bank financing dries up, and Washington lurches along a rocky road.

Major Personal Finance Faq, Richard H. Serlin

Richard H. Serlin

A rare source of detailed, extensive, state of the art answers to some of the most important questions in personal finance.

The Limits Of The Market-Wide Limits Of Arbitrage: Insights From The Dynamics Of 100 Anomalies, Hieiko Jacobs

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Are anomalies strongest when limits of arbitrage are widely considered to be greatest? We empirically explore this theoretically deducted prediction. We first identify, categorize, and replicate 100 anomalies in the cross-section of expected equity returns. We then comprehensively study their dynamic interaction with popular proxies for time-varying market-level arbitrage conditions. Our findings reveal a surprisingly weak role of commonly employed measures of market-wide arbitrage risks and constraints. Even though this “big picture” evidence is by no means conclusive, our findings might potentially be best interpreted as supporting the growing literature which uncovers some shortcomings of the limits to arbitrage argument.

Why Do Retail Investors Make Costly Mistakes? An Experiment On Mutual Fund Choice, Jill E. Fisch, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Faculty Scholarship

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve diversification, and payment of excessive fund fees. Over the past thirty-five years, however, participant-directed 401(k) plans have largely replaced professionally managed pension plans, requiring unsophisticated retail investors to navigate the financial markets themselves. Policy-makers have struggled with regulatory interventions designed to improve the quality of investment decisions without a clear understanding of the reasons for investor mistakes. Absent such an understanding, it is difficult to design effective regulatory responses.

This article offers a first step in understanding the investor decision-making process. We use an ...

How Large Are The Benefits Of Emerging Market Equities?, C. Mitchell Conover, Gerald R. Jensen, Robert R. Johnson

Finance Faculty Publications

We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits of emerging market equities by extending previous research in four fundamental ways. The contribution of this study is that it 1) evaluates a more complete sample; 2) examines performance measures that account for asymmetric return distributions; 3) separates emerging markets by region; and 4) considers the influence that the market environment has on the benefits of emerging market investments. Our results suggest that previous research has understated the benefits associated with investing in emerging markets. We find that broad emerging market indices have relatively low downside risk, which results in Sortino ratios ...

Us Real Estate Investment Performance: 1983-2012, John F. Kerrigan

Honors Theses

This study provides an overview of real estate investment performance over a 1983-2012 time period. The results show that although equity REITs outperformed all other assets on average annual return, on a risk-adjusted basis both private retail and apartment real estate outperformed all other assets. The study also found a recent trend in increased correlation between common stocks and REITs.

Leverage Buy-Out Case Study, Binh Duc Nguyen

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Causal Relation Between Stock Return And Trading Volume In Nigerian Capital Market, Mutalib Anifowose Mr

Mutalib Anifowose Mr

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Director Stock Ownership And Board Discussion Transparency On Financial Reporting Quality, Jacob M. Rose, Cheri Mazza, Carolyn S. Norman, Anna M. Rose

WCOB Faculty Publications

Seventy-two active corporate directors participate in an experiment where management insists on aggressive recognition of revenue, but the chief audit executive proposes a more conservative approach. Results indicate interactive effects of director stock ownership and the transparency of director decisions. Stock-owning directors are more likely to oppose management’s attempts to manage earnings when transparency increases. For non-stock owning directors, however, increasing transparency does not affect the likelihood that directors oppose management’s attempts to manage earnings. The current study challenges suppositions that equate director stock ownership with improved financial reporting and higher corporate governance quality, and it provides evidence ...

How Diversified Is Your Equity Portfolio?, Bruce Vanstone

Faculty of Business Publications

Extract: There can’t be many investors today who aren’t aware of the importance of diversification. Even the simplest form of naïve diversification, which just entails spreading your equity investments over as many companies as possible, is beneficial. Other more complex forms, such as modern portfolio theory allow investment professionals to use diversification as a construct in managing portfolio risk.

101 Financial Accounting Practices: Practical Questions And Answers, George E. Ekeha

George E Ekeha

More often that not, our accounting practices at the corporate levels have been very different from what actually goes on in our schools and universities. Many of our graduate students in accounting get into the real world of work and realised that whatever they learnt in the classrooms have not much impact on the practice of accounting in the corporate environment.

This book intends to bring some practical (not totally though, but I am sure it would help others to start thinking about the solutions) questions for prospective accounting graduates to test themselves on the realities of accounting jobs. The ...

Assessing The Financial Failure Using Z-Score And Current Ratio: A Case Of Sugar Sector Listed Companies Of Kse, Muhammad Shahzad Ijaz, Ahmed Imran Hunjra, Rauf I. Azam

Ahmed Imran Hunjra

Since 1968, after the development of multivariate model, financial health of the corporate sector to predict their financial failure is heavily studied. Altman Z-Score is the most efficient model to judge the financial failure of the companies. This study uses Altman’s Z-Score and current ratio to assess the financial status of sugar sector companies listed at Karachi stock exchange. Sugar sector is the second largest slice among all sectors listed at Karachi stock exchange. Total population sampling technique was used in this study and all thirty five sugar sector listed companies at KSE were included in this study to ...