Securities Law Commons^™

Are Investors’ Gains And Losses From Securities Fraud Equal Over Time?, Alicia J. Davis

Alicia Davis

Leading securities regulation scholars argue that compensating securities fraud victims is inefficient because diversified investors that trade frequently (generally, institutional investors) are as likely to gain from trading in fraud-tainted stocks as they are to suffer harm from doing so. In other words, institutional investors have no expected net losses from fraud over the long term and are effectively hedged against fraud risk. Moreover, individual investors can protect themselves from fraud, as well, by investing through diversified institutional intermediaries. In this Article, I demonstrate, using both probability theory and observational and computer-simulated trading data, that the argument of the compensation …