Portfolio and Security Analysis Commons^™

The End Of The Internal Compliance World As We Know It, Or An Enhancement Of The Effectiveness Of Securities Law Enforcement? Bounty Hunting Under The Dodd-Frank Act's Whistleblower Provision, Justin Blount, Spencer Markel

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

In the wake of Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme and the recent economic crisis stemming largely from loosely regulated subprime lending and mortgage-backed securities, President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on July 21, 2010, signaling loudly and clearly that change is coming to Wall Street. But Wall Street is not the only one receiving a message. Buried deep within the 2,319 pages of the Dodd-Frank Act, companies can find Section 922, the whistleblower provision, which provides a bounty for whistleblowers who report securities violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission.These bounty provisions and …

Lessons From The Flash Crash For The Regulation Of High-Frequency Traders, Edgar Ortega Barrales

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Are equity markets vulnerable to a sudden collapse if the traders who account for about half of the volume have no regulatory obligations to stabilize prices? After the “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, policymakers have resoundingly answered this question in the affirmative. During the worst of the crash, some of the so-called high-frequency trading firms that dominate equity markets stopped trading and prices collapsed, momentarily wiping out almost $1 trillion in market value. In response, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is considering whether high-frequency trading firms should be required to act as the traders of last resort. This …

Burning Down The House Or Simply Rolling The Dice: A Comment On Section 621 Of The Dodd-Frank Act And Recommendation For Its Implementation, Joshua R. Rosenthal

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

Section 621 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act modifies the Securities Act of 1933 to prohibit the underwriter, placement agent, initial purchaser, or sponsor, or any affiliate or subsidiary of any such entity of an asset-backed financial product from betting against that very product for one year after the product’s initial sale. The rule prohibits anyone who structures or sells an asset-backed security or a product composed of asset-backed securities from going short, in the specified timeframe, on what they have sold, and labels such transactions as presenting material conflicts of interest. This Comment discusses traces …

Private Equity Investment In The Brics, Andreas Woeller

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Article investigates the legal and economic environment for private equity investments in Brazil, Russia, India and China (“BRIC”). In contrast with disappointing returns in the 1990s, private equity investment has soared in developing countries over the past decade. To explain what has led to the recent success of private equity in the BRICs, this Article will first give an overview of the challenges faced generally when investing in portfolio companies in developing markets and then analyze the legal and economic framework for each of the four BRICs. This Article finds that Brazil and China offer the best opportunities for …

Testing Overreaction And Under-Reaction In The Commodity Futures Market, Jingyu Dai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Results from previous studies testing for under-reaction and overreaction in the commodity futures market are mixed and inconclusive. Using a data of more than 20 categories of future contacts ranging from agricultural, metal and energy, we have found significant evidence of under-reaction in food and agricultural commodities but not in the energy and metal sector. It is also found that those relatively inactive commodity future contracts tend to have a stronger tendency to under-react than commodity future contracts are very actively traded. The result also agrees with the behavioral hypothesis that under-reaction is caused by gradual incorporation of information among …

Corporate Security: Using Knowledge Construction To Define A Practising Body Of Knowledge, David Brooks

Research outputs 2012

Security is a multidimensional concept, with many meanings, practising domains, and heterogeneous occupations. Therefore, it is difficult to define security as a singular concept, although understanding may be achieved by its applied context in presenting a domicile body of knowledge. There have been studies that have presented a number of corporate security bodies of knowledge; however, there is still restricted consensus. From these past body of knowledge studies, and supported by multidimensional scaling knowledge mapping, a body of knowledge framework is put forward, integrating core and allied knowledge categories. The core knowledge categories include practise areas such as risk management, …

Finding Profitability Of Technical Trading Rules In Emerging Market Exchange Traded Funds, Austin P. Hallett

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis further investigates the effectiveness of 15 variable moving average strategies that mimic the trading rules used in the study by Brock, Lakonishok, and LeBaron (1992). Instead of applying these strategies to developed markets, unique characteristics of emerging markets offer opportunity to investors that warrant further research. Before transaction costs, all 15 variable moving average strategies outperform the naïve benchmark strategy of buying and holding different emerging market ETF's over the volatile period of 858 trading days. However, the variable moving averages perform poorly in the "bubble" market cycle. In fact, sell signals become more unprofitable than buy signals …

Transaction Consistency And The New Finance In Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr., Thomas Jackson

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior to the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act last summer, derivatives and repurchase agreements (“repos”) were largely unregulated outside of bankruptcy, and also were exempted from core bankruptcy provisions such as the automatic stay, which prevents creditors from seizing collateral or attempting to collect what they are owed. The Dodd-Frank Act now extensively regulates derivatives outside of bankruptcy, but it left their special treatment in bankruptcy completely untouched.

There is a gap in the debate over this special treatment. To date, neither scholars nor the derivatives industry have fully analyzed the key counterfactual: what would happen if derivatives and repos …

Frog In The Pan: Continuous Information And Momentum, Zhi Da, G. Gurun, Mitchell Craig Warachka

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We develop and test a frog-in-the-pan hypothesis that predicts investors are less attentive to information arriving continuously in small amounts than to information with the same cumulative stock price implications arriving in large amounts at discrete timepoints. Intuitively, we hypothesize that a series of gradual frequent changes attracts less attention than infrequent dramatic changes. Consistent with our frog-in-the-pan hypothesis, we find strong evidence that continuous information induces stronger and more persistent return continuation. Over a six-month holding period, momentum decreases monotonically from 8.86% for stocks with continuous information during their formation period to 2.91% for stocks with discrete information. Higher …

Hedging Effectiveness Under Conditions Of Asymmetry, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

We examine whether hedging effectiveness is affected by asymmetry in the return distribution by applying tail specific metrics, for example, Value at Risk, to compare the hedging effectiveness of short and long hedgers. Comparisons are applied to a number of hedging strategies including OLS, and both symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models. We apply our analysis to a dataset consisting of S&P500 index cash and futures containing symmetric and asymmetric return distributions chosen ex-post. Our findings show that asymmetry reduces out-of-sample hedging performance and that significant differences occur in hedging performance between short and long hedgers.

Pricing Mortality Securities With Correlated Mortality Indexes, Yijia Lin, Sheen Liu, Jifeng Yu

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

This article proposes a stochastic model, which captures mortality correlations across countries and common mortality shocks, for analyzing catastrophe mortality contingent claims. To estimate our model, we apply particle filtering, a general technique that has wide applications in non-Gaussian and multivariate jump-diffusion models and models with nonanalytic observation equations. In addition, we illustrate how to price mortality securities with normalized multivariate exponential titling based on the estimated mortality correlations and jump parameters. Our results show the significance of modeling mortality correlations and transient jumps in mortality security pricing.

Can An Old Dog Learn New Tricks? Applying Traditional Corporate Law Principles To New Social Enterprise Legislation, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Seven U.S. states have recently adopted the benefit corporation or the flexible purpose corporation—two novel corporate forms intended to house social enterprises, i.e., those ventures that pursue social and environmental missions along with profits. And yet, these corporate forms are not viable or sustainable if they do not attract social entrepreneurs or social investors due to the lack of understanding and inquiry into how traditional corporate law principles will be applied to them. This article begins this necessary examination. As a first approach, this article assesses shareholder primacy and the shareholder wealth maximization norm in the context of the sale …

Mutual Fund Size, Fund Family Size And Mutual Fund Performance: The Role Of Regulatory Changes, Sanjeev Bhojra, Young Jun Cho, Nir Yehuda

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine whether the previously documented positive association between fund family size and fund performance is affected by significant regulatory changes (i.e., Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), the Global Settlement (GS), and increased scrutiny as a result of trading scandals) that have occurred in the last decade. Using Reg FD as a beginning point for these structural changes, we find that, while fund family size was positively associated with fund performance in the period prior to the regulatory changes, this advantage is significantly weaker in the period subsequent to the regulatory changes. Consistent with the weakened advantage of fund family …

Technical Analysis: An Asian Perspective, Siqin Liaw

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Technical analysis, namely the moving average rule and the channel rule, is applied to the currency of an Asian managed floating exchange rate regime (USD/SGD) to see if opportunities for profitable trading exist. Instead of using only daily or monthly data, higher frequency time frames of 10, 15, 30 and 60 minutes are analyzed. Profitable strategies (if any) will be broken down and analyzed within smaller time frames to see if the profits are specifically in sample.

The Impact Of Internet-Based Services On Credit Unions: A Propensity Score Matching Approach, Elisabeta Pana, Sascha Vitzthum, David Willis

Elisabeta Pana

Credit unions focus their profit and capital management on the tradeoff between providing immediate financial benefits to members and augmenting their institutional well-being through capital accumulation. In this study, we investigate the changes in benefits to credit union members via the interest-rate spread around the adoptions of internet-based services for the period of 2000–2009. Using the propensity score matching method, we show that adopters offer a less favorable interest-rate spread to their members than non-adopters. However, we find evidence that early adopters have a lower degree of market power in dealing with their members than late adopters and offer interest-rate …

Qep And Bank Liquidity Creation: Evidence From Japan, Elisabeta Pana

Elisabeta Pana

The 2001-2006 Japanese quantitative easing policy (QEP) represents the most prominent example of unconventional monetary policy used prior to the recent financial crisis. This paper contributes to the current debate over the effectiveness of Japan’s QEP by documenting the changes in absolute amount of liquidity created by Japanese banks during the period of 2001-2007. Using the liquidity creation measure developed by Berger and Bouwman (2009), we document the impact of macroeconomic factors and bank characteristic on liquidity creation. The analysis is conducted in a multivariate dynamic panel regression framework using a dataset comprised of 120 Japanese banks containing balance sheet …

Modeling Dependence Using Skew T Copulas: Bayesian Inference And Applications, Michael S. Smith, Quan Gan, Robert Kohn

Michael Stanley Smith

[THIS IS AN AUGUST 2010 REVISION THAT REPLACES ALL PREVIOUS VERSIONS.]

We construct a copula from the skew t distribution of Sahu, Dey & Branco (2003). This copula can capture asymmetric and extreme dependence between variables, and is one of the few copulas that can do so and still be used in high dimensions effectively. However, it is difficult to estimate the copula model by maximum likelihood when the multivariate dimension is high, or when some or all of the marginal distributions are discrete-valued, or when the parameters in the marginal distributions and copula are estimated jointly. We therefore propose …

Charting Your Financial Goals, Benedict Koh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Every one of us has financial goals but not many of us know how to go about achieving them. We often lack investment knowledge or expertise to design an investment plan that optimises our savings. Consequently, we adopt the default approach of leaving all our savings in bank deposits. By doing so, we have already made an asset allocation decision, one that is very conservative. Over time, we soon realise that this conservative investment plan is simply not working as our savings are not compounding fast enough to keep up with inflation. We need to invest more wisely so that …

A Multiechelon Inventory Problem With Secondary Market Sales, Alexandar Angelus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We consider a finite-horizon, multiechelon inventory system in which the surplus of stock can be sold (i.e., disposed) in the secondary markets at each stage in the system. What are called nested echelon order-up-to policies are shown to be optimal for jointly managing inventory replenishments and secondary market sales. Under a general restriction on model parameters, we establish that it is optimal not to both sell off excess stock and replenish inventory. Secondary market sales complicate the structure of the system, so that the classical Clark and Scarf echelon reformulation no longer allows for the decomposition of the objective function …

The Effect Of Information Quality On Liquidity Risk, Jeffrey Ng

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

I investigate whether information quality affects the cost of equity capital through liquidity risk. Liquidity risk is the sensitivity of stock returns to unexpected changes in market liquidity; recent asset pricing literature has emphasized the importance of this systematic risk. I find that higher information quality is associated with lower liquidity risk and that the reduction in cost of capital due to this association is economically significant. I also find that the negative association between information quality and liquidity risk is stronger in times of large shocks to market liquidity.