Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Knowledge-Driven Autonomous Commodity Trading Advisor, Yee Pin Lim, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The myth that financial trading is an art has been mostly destroyed in the recent decade due to the proliferation of algorithmic trading. In equity markets, algorithmic trading has already bypass human traders in terms of traded volume. This trend seems to be irreversible, and other asset classes are also quickly becoming dominated by the machine traders. However, for asset that requires deeper understanding of physicality, like the trading of commodities, human traders still have significant edge over machines. The primary advantage of human traders in such market is the qualitative expert knowledge that requires traders to consider not just …

Student Loan Debt, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Obviously real estate was the focus of the recent credit (or subprime) crisis. However, many investors believe that student loan debt, which is also bundled and sold (i.e., collateralized), is the next "crisis" area. Student debt has risen substantially, as has the percentage of borrowers in delinquency. See these two articles: Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Insider Trading, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

Insider trading (i.e., trading on material nonpublic information) is illegal. However, corporate executives are allowed to trade stock in the firms they manage. This is difficult to reconcile since these executives, in all likelihood, have such information. A recent study by the Wall Street Journal found that executives trading ahead of corporate earnings announcements earned substantially higher returns (or avoided substantially lower losses). See article here.

Financial Services Consolidation And Performance In New York State Savings And Loan Associations, 2000-2011, Mine Aysen Doyran

Publications and Research

The market structure-performance relationship has been tested for US banking in industrial organization studies. Two divergent hypotheses with regard to this relationship are the Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) Paradigm and Efficient Structure Hypothesis (ESH). This paper presents the test results of both hypotheses with respect to the New York State S&L associations using the time-series and cross sectional (firm-level) data for the most recent period 2000-2010. The results of PEGLS regression indicate that performances of S&Ls vary with respect to operating cost, credit risk and capitalization. Neither market share nor concentration, however, plays a significant role in explaining profitability. The results partially …

The Relationship Among The Liquidity In Real Economy, Financial Economy And Inflation, Zhaoxuan Sun

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

This paper introduces the principles supporting the fisher transaction equation. Then, it transforms the traditional quantity equation, and adds the financial economic department into the equation to estimate currency liquidity respectively. We show that when liquidity enters into the real economy and the financial economy, the capital price will change earlier than the product price does. We could also interpret that the excess liquidity in the financial economy firstly affects the capital price. Then, the capital price will take positive effects on the product price. This is opposed to the influence mechanism taken by liquidity on the real economy. We …

Stock Market Efficiency In The S&P 500 With Respect To Day Of The Week, Zachary James Rodenbarger

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Theoretically speaking, we assume that markets are efficient and that investors should not be able to earn abnormal returns without privately held information. The fact that fund managers beat the market can simply be explained as luck. However, realistically speaking, the markets involve humans that do not always make rational decisions, which can lead to market inefficiencies. This paper looks into one such inefficiency which regards trading day of the week in the S&P 500 through three different forecasting periods coming before, during, and after the financial crisis of 2008. Theoretically we would expect to find no pattern or correlation …

Link Between S&P 500 And Ftse 100 And The Comparison Of That Link Before And After The S&P 500 Peak In October 2007, Michael Joseph Silk

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

The paper reviews the correlation between the S&P 500 and the FTSE 100 before and during the 2008 global financial crisis. It found that The S&P 500 has a strong causation effect on the FTSE 100, both before and since the financial crisis. This link seems to have increased after the October 2007 peak in the S&P 500. Since the crisis, the FTSE 100 appears to have a weak causation effect on the S&P 500. Before the crisis there was no apparent impact on the S&P 500’s movements from movements in the FTSE 100.

The Empirical Study Of Earnings Management Based On Chinese Listed Companies, Yang Zhang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Earnings management that is used to manipulate book earnings to an expected level has been one of the controversial topics in the accounting field. It occurs two ways: one is accrued earnings management and the other is real earnings management. Many studies show that these two methods have a reciprocal relationship based on the costs of using them. The accrued earnings management method is preferred when the accounting standards are flexible and the real earnings management is preferred when the legal systems are good. This paper verifies its findings by drawing a link to the new accounting standard announced by …

The Global Financial Tsunami : 2008, Juan Manuel Chaves Echeverri

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

In 2008 a series of bankruptcies of financial institutions led the United States and the principal economies of the world into a recession of great magnitude that required exceptional government intervention.

It started on September 14th when Lehman Brothers announced that it was entering into chapter 11 bankruptcy. After this, there was intervention in recognized multinational corporations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and American International Group. There were also the bank failures of Washington Mutual and Citigroup.

The main cause of this crisis was the excessive level of leverage of the financial industry, which had its roots in the real …

Nonprofit Funding Agencies’ Review Of Grant Recipients, Siobain Mcilvain

Honors Theses - Providence Campus

Nonprofits need to be just as responsible as public corporations. Nonprofit funding agencies have the responsibility for evaluating the organizations they fund to make sure that they are operating with high integrity, maintaining strong internal controls, remaining financially stable, and overall being good stewards of the funds received. This paper will explain the criteria that a funding agency should follow in order to affect this process, as well as how a recipient nonprofit will benefit from following the criteria.

Fiscal Cliff, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

There has been much discussion surrounding the impending "fiscal cliff." So, what exactly is this? Well, it is a combination of items that effectively equate to about $600 billion in potential spending cuts and tax increases. This represents about 4% of US GDP. So, failing to address these issues would likely result in a deep, prolonged recession. Read a good summary here, American Action Forum.

Index Etfs -- Not Created Equal, Steven D. Dolvin

All Chapters

You might expect that all "Large Cap" ETFs are the same, as they would likely track the S&P500 index. However, in an effort to reduce costs, many ETF providers (such as Vanguard) are replacing the standard index with others that charge lower licensing fees. This allows the providers to either reduce the expenses they charge or increase operating margins. As providers make this switch, it could also impact the underlying holdings to the extent that differences occur across the indexes. See article here, Wall Street Journal.

Feasibility Analysis Of A Microbrewery, Dylan Warren Snyder

Agribusiness

No abstract provided.

Diseconomies Of Scale In The Hedge Fund Industry, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

How does fund size impact fund performance in the hedge fund industry? We find unsurprisingly that fund size crimps both raw and risk-adjusted fund returns for the average hedge fund. An increase in fund assets under management from US$20m to US$1bn decreases fund alpha by 2.04 percent per year. However, significant variation exists across funds when funds are grouped by investment strategy and region. Equity long/short, event driven, and macro funds are susceptible to capacity constraints while fixed income and managed futures funds are largely immune to such concerns. Our finding that capacity issues impact macro fund performance raises fresh …

How Skilled Are Hedge Funds? Evidence From Their Daily Trades, Russell Jame

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We examine the trading skill of hedge funds using transaction-level data. After accounting for trading commissions, we find no evidence that the trades of the average hedge fund outperform across holding periods ranging from one month to one year. However, bootstrap simulations indicate that the trading skill of the top 10% of hedge funds cannot be explained by luck. Similarly, we find that the performance of top hedge funds persists and much of this persistence stems from intra-quarter trading skill. Skilled hedge funds tend to be short-term contrarians and their profits are largely concentrated in smaller, more illiquid stocks. Our …

Communicating In Markets: Is It Worthy To Be Wordy?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

In the midst of on-going discussions around complex financial concepts, it is perhaps time to step back and look at the importance of communication, said David G Fernandez, head of JP Morgan’s Emerging Asia Research team, at the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (SKBI) Annual Conference. He notes the importance for policy makers to communicate with market participants in light of the increase in volatility and tail risks in financial markets

The Odd Quarter Research Report, Third Quarter, Volume 1, Issue 2, Bryant University, Archway Investment Fund

Archway Investment Fund

No abstract provided.

Sony Corporation: Reinventing Itself To Rediscover The Technological Edge, Chatterji Dheeman, Hayes Schildwachter, Jeffrey S. Harrison

Robins Case Network

Sony is a global conglomerate with a wide variety of businesses in its portfolio, but a heavy emphasis on electronics and related products. Due to a number of setbacks such as the earthquake in Japan and a weak global economy, the firm has experienced sales declines and negative earnings in recent years. In early 2012 the company announced a major restructuring and new strategy to regain its edge. However, Sony has an uphill battle.

Investors Do Respond To Poor Mutual Fund Performance: Evidence From Inflows And Outflows, George D. Cashman, Daniel N. Deli, Federico Nardari, Sriram V. Villupuram

Finance Faculty Research and Publications

Abstract

We examine the relation between mutual fund performance and gross flows for a large sample of actively managed U.S. mutual funds. Unlike previous studies that have only examined periods of generally increasing net flows, our sample includes periods of both increasing and decreasing net flows. We find that outflows are related to performance, with investors withdrawing money from poor performers. We also find that outflows and inflows respond asymmetrically to performance, outflows increase more aggressively following poor performance, and inflows increase more aggressively following good performance. Additionally, we find a symmetric performance net flow relation.

Algorithmic Trading And Changes In Firms Equity Capital, Ekkehart Boehmer, Kingsley Fong, Julie Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We use a large sample from 2001 to 2009 that incorporates intraday transactions data from 39 exchanges and an average of 12,800 different common stocks to assess the effect of algorithmic trading (AT) on firms’ capital raising activities. Greater AT reduces net equity issues over the next year, but this is only partly driven by AT’s effect on proceeds from new securities issues. Our findings suggest that the main driver of this relationship is AT’s effect on share repurchases.