Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Finance and Financial Management Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Singapore Management University

Discipline
Keyword
Publication Year
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 991 - 1020 of 1293

Full-Text Articles in Finance and Financial Management

A "Glittering" Bubble: Where Is Gold, At A Record High, Heading Next?, Knowledge@Smu Apr 2011

A "Glittering" Bubble: Where Is Gold, At A Record High, Heading Next?, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Since 2000, the price of gold has surged more than four times to an all time high of more than US$1,400. Is it purely speculative demand that is driving this unprecedented, multi-year surge, or are there other factors at play? With gold at such a high level, is it time for investors to bet that it will drop? Tarun K. Tandon, CEO of FLS Corporation, shares his thoughts at a recent International Trading Institute@SMU seminar.

Go to article

After The Year Of Two Halves: Outlook, Risks And Opportunities For 2011, Knowledge@Smu Apr 2011

After The Year Of Two Halves: Outlook, Risks And Opportunities For 2011, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

The post-Lehman Brothers recovery in global financial markets may not have been as reassuring as investors hoped. Meanwhile, conflicts and natural disasters continue to cloud the overall outlook. Through it all, which are the sectors and asset classes to watch in 2011? Senior portfolio fund manager Ong Guat Cheng shares her personal take at SMU's Centre for Asset Securitisation and Management in Asia.

Go to article

Divining The Merits And Pitfalls Of Dividends, Knowledge@Smu Apr 2011

Divining The Merits And Pitfalls Of Dividends, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Capital gains on stock investments are not always a given, but many companies make it a point to give their shareholders a steady flow of returns that do not require a sell. While such payouts are not as exciting as hitting that 'multi-bagger', here’s something more certain: over time, patient shareholders have more to reap. In 'The Little Book of Big Dividends', author Charles Carlson draws readers' attention to the merits and red flags of investing for dividends.

Go to article

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivek Gopalkrishnan Apr 2011

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For On-Line Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivek Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On-line portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing on-line portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidences show that the stock price relatives may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel on-line portfolio selection strategy named ``Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion'' (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, …

Go to article

The Liquidity Risk Of Liquid Hedge Funds, Melvyn Teo Apr 2011

The Liquidity Risk Of Liquid Hedge Funds, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper evaluates hedge funds that grant favorable redemption terms to investors. Within this group of purportedly liquid funds, high net inflow funds subsequently outperform low net inflow funds by 4.79% per year after adjusting for risk. The return impact of fund flows is stronger when funds embrace liquidity risk, when market liquidity is low, and when funding liquidity, as measured by the Treasury-Eurodollar spread, aggregate hedge fund flows, and prime broker stock returns, is tight. In keeping with an agency explanation, funds with strong incentives to raise capital, low manager option deltas, and no manager capital co-invested are more …

Go to article

Equity Incentives And Earnings Management: Evidence From The Banking Industry, Qiang Cheng, Terry Warfield, Minlei Ye Apr 2011

Equity Incentives And Earnings Management: Evidence From The Banking Industry, Qiang Cheng, Terry Warfield, Minlei Ye

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine the relationship between equity incentives and earnings management in the banking industry. By focusing on this regulated industry and using industry-specific earnings management proxies, we provide evidence on the impact of regulation on earnings management arising from chief executive officers' equity incentives. We find that bank managers with high equity incentives are more likely to manage earnings, but only when capital ratios are closer to the minimums required by regulators. This finding indicates that, in the banking industry, potential regulatory intervention induces, rather than mitigates, earnings management arising from equity incentives.

Go to article

Hedge Funds, Managerial Skill, And Macroeconomic Variables, Doron Avramov, Robert Kosowski, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo Mar 2011

Hedge Funds, Managerial Skill, And Macroeconomic Variables, Doron Avramov, Robert Kosowski, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Duplicate, see https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/1867/. This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment styles. While we also allow for predictability in fund risk loadings and benchmark returns, the major source of investment profitability is predictability in managerial skills. In particular, long-only strategies that incorporate predictability in managerial skills outperform their Fung and Hsieh (2004) benchmarks by over 17 percent per year. The economic value of predictability obtains for different rebalancing horizons and alternative benchmark …

Go to article

Trend Of The Future, Not Flavour Of The Month: The Changing Private Equity Industry In Emerging Markets, Knowledge@Smu Mar 2011

Trend Of The Future, Not Flavour Of The Month: The Changing Private Equity Industry In Emerging Markets, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

With memories of the recent global financial crisis still fresh in many people's minds, investors are shying away from anything that may sound too risky or complex. TPG Capital, on the other hand, is taking this opportunity to place their bets on the emerging markets. To secure its investments, Ashish Shastry, managing director and Southeast Asia head of this prominent private equity firm, recommended to the audiences at SMU's BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre, a road less travelled – engagement and consulting. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Go to article

A Divertissement On The Financial Crisis: We've Been Speculating, Stefano Harney Mar 2011

A Divertissement On The Financial Crisis: We've Been Speculating, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We’ve been speculating. They say our speculation is going to make things worse. But we keep speculating. We’re on the porch, on the corner, in the bar, at the stove, speculating. We’re with others speculating. We’re in debt, bad debt, with others. We’re speculating on others and they’re speculating on us at the table, round the playground, on the bus. We’ve been speculating, banking on each other. We’ve been counting on others, speculating about them. We’re with them and they’re with us, speculating. Our speculation is scattered. Our speculation is scattered among others. Our speculation is valued among others, others …

Go to article

Consolidating Information In Option Transactions, Richard Holowczak, Jianfeng Hu, Liuren Wu Mar 2011

Consolidating Information In Option Transactions, Richard Holowczak, Jianfeng Hu, Liuren Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Underlying each stock trades hundreds of options at different strike prices and maturities. The order flows from these option transactions reveal important information about the underlying stock price. How to aggregate the trade information of different option contracts underlying the same stock presents an interesting and important question for developing microstructure theories and price discovery mechanisms in the derivatives markets. This paper takes options on QQQQ, the Nasdaq 100 tracking stock, as an example and examines different order flow consolidation mechanisms in terms of their effectiveness in extracting information about the underlying stock price and volatility movements. The analysis leads …

Go to article

Hedge Funds, Managerial Skill, And Macroeconomic Variables, Doron Avramov, Robert Kosowski, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo Mar 2011

Hedge Funds, Managerial Skill, And Macroeconomic Variables, Doron Avramov, Robert Kosowski, Narayan Y. Naik, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper evaluates hedge fund performance through portfolio strategies that incorporate predictability based on macroeconomic variables. Incorporating predictability substantially improves out-of-sample performance for the entire universe of hedge funds as well as for various investment styles. While we also allow for predictability in fund risk loadings and benchmark returns, the major source of investment profitability is predictability in managerial skills. In particular, long-only strategies that incorporate predictability in managerial skills outperform their Fung and Hsieh (2004) benchmarks by over 17% per year. The economic value of predictability obtains for different rebalancing horizons and alternative benchmark models. It is also robust …

Go to article

Pairwise Correlations, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Qing Tong Mar 2011

Pairwise Correlations, Tarun Chordia, Amit Goyal, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Pairwise stock correlations increase by 27% on average when stock returns are negative. It is trading activity in small stocks that leads to higher correlations when returns are negative. We provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that co-ordinated selling by retail investors drives this asymmetry in correlations. The co-ordinated selling activity by retail investors is triggered by negative market returns.

Go to article

The Unintended Effects Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Vidhi Chhaochharia, Clemens A. Otto, Vikrant Vig Mar 2011

The Unintended Effects Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Vidhi Chhaochharia, Clemens A. Otto, Vikrant Vig

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed in the wake of several scandals that rocked corporate America in 2001 and 2002. The objective behind SOX was to improve corporate governance by improving accounting disclosures. Compliance with Section 404 is considered by many to be the most costly requirement of SOX and has been argued to be a disproportionate burden for small firms. Consequently, firms with a public float below $75 million were granted several exemptions from compliance. We document an unintended effect of these exemptions: a weakening of corporate governance through a weakening of the market for corporate control.

Go to article

Out-Of-Sample Industry Return Predictability: Evidence From A Large Number Of Predictors, David E. Rapach, Jack K. Strauss, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou Feb 2011

Out-Of-Sample Industry Return Predictability: Evidence From A Large Number Of Predictors, David E. Rapach, Jack K. Strauss, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We uncover extensive evidence of out-of-sample return predictability for industry portfolios based on a principal component approach that incorporates information from a large number of predictors. Moreover, we find substantial differences in the degree of return predictability across industries. To understand these differences, we propose a decomposition of out-of-sample industry return predictability into beta and alpha shares, where the former corresponds to a conditional beta pricing model. A conditional version of the popular Fama-French three-factor model accounts for nearly all out-of-sample industry return predictability, with exposures to time-varying market and size risk premiums especially important for explaining differences in return …

Go to article

Explosive Behavior In The 1990s Nasdaq: When Did Exuberance Escalate Asset Values?, Peter C. B. Phillips, Yangru Wu, Jun Yu Feb 2011

Explosive Behavior In The 1990s Nasdaq: When Did Exuberance Escalate Asset Values?, Peter C. B. Phillips, Yangru Wu, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A recursive test procedure is suggested that provides a mechanism for testing explosive behavior, date stamping the origination and collapse of economic exuberance, and providing valid confidence intervals for explosive growth rates. The method involves the recursive implementation of a right-side unit root test and a sup test, both of which are easy to use in practical applications, and some new limit theory for mildly explosive processes. The test procedure is shown to have discriminatory power in detecting periodically collapsing bubbles, thereby overcoming a weakness in earlier applications of unit root tests for economic bubbles. An empirical application to the …

Go to article

Carnivorous Lions And Herbivorous Asians: How The Recession Has Made A Case For Leadership In Asia, Knowledge@Smu Jan 2011

Carnivorous Lions And Herbivorous Asians: How The Recession Has Made A Case For Leadership In Asia, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

It may seem as if the worse is over. Those oversights and indiscretions which led to the global financial crisis have been exposed and dealt with – or have they? According to Andrew Sheng, renowned economist and distinguished speaker at SMU's Ngee Ann Kongsi Annual Lecture Series, the severity of the crisis is far more extensive than most people believe. Compounding the problem are systemic complexities brought on by "shadow banking", "moral hazards", and the carnivorous lions of Wall Street.

Go to article

Gold, Gas And Grains: Smartest Investment For The Coming Decade?, Knowledge@Smu Jan 2011

Gold, Gas And Grains: Smartest Investment For The Coming Decade?, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

The disappointing performance of investments like stocks, bonds and real estate during the recent crisis, has only served to accentuate the attractiveness of investing in commodities. With finite supply and voracious demand from countries like China, it seems that the prices of oil, gold, iron and other natural resources could only rise. John Stephenson, of First Asset Investment Management Inc, tells us more in The Little Book of Commodity Investing, why investing in commodities is timely and smart.

Go to article

The Impact Of Transaction Duration, Volume And Direction On Price Dynamics And Volatility, Anthony S. Tay, Christopher Ting, Yiu Kuen Tse, Mitchell Warachka Jan 2011

The Impact Of Transaction Duration, Volume And Direction On Price Dynamics And Volatility, Anthony S. Tay, Christopher Ting, Yiu Kuen Tse, Mitchell Warachka

Research Collection School Of Economics

We explore the role of trade volume, trade direction, and the duration between trades in explaining price dynamics and volatility using an Asymmetric Autoregressive Conditional Duration model applied to intraday transactions data. Our results suggest that volume, direction and duration are important determinants of price dynamics, while duration is also an important determinant of volatility. However, the impact of volume and direction on volatility is marginal after controlling for duration, and the impact of volume on volatility appears to be confined to periods of infrequent trading.

Go to article

Lessons From The Financial Crisis: Report Of The Asian Financial Regulatory Committee, Jeremy Choo Yong Goh, Sri Adiningsih, Maria S. Gochoco-Bautista Jan 2011

Lessons From The Financial Crisis: Report Of The Asian Financial Regulatory Committee, Jeremy Choo Yong Goh, Sri Adiningsih, Maria S. Gochoco-Bautista

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

Go to article

Understanding Investor Sentiment: The Case Of Soccer, Gennaro Bernile, Evgeny Lyandres Jan 2011

Understanding Investor Sentiment: The Case Of Soccer, Gennaro Bernile, Evgeny Lyandres

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the extent to which the stock market's inefficient responses to resolutions of uncertainty depend on investors’ biased ex ante beliefs regarding the probability distribution of future event outcomes or their ex post irrational reactions to these outcomes. We use a sample of publicly traded European soccer clubs and analyze their returns around important matches. Using a novel proxy for investors’ expectations based on contracts traded on betting exchanges (prediction markets), we find that within our sample, investor sentiment is attributable, in part, to a systematic bias in investors’ ex ante expectations. Investors are overly optimistic about their teams’ …

Go to article

Markowitz Meets Talmud: A Combination Of Sophisticated And Naive Diversification Strategies, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou Jan 2011

Markowitz Meets Talmud: A Combination Of Sophisticated And Naive Diversification Strategies, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The modern portfolio theory pioneered by Markowitz (1952) is widely used in practice and extensively taught to MBAs. However, the estimated Markowitz portfolio rule and most of its extensions not only underperform the naive 1/N rule (that invests equally across N assets) in simulations, but also lose money on a risk-adjusted basis in many real data sets. In this paper, we propose an optimal combination of the naive 1/N rule with one of the four sophisticated strategies—the Markowitz rule, the Jorion (1986) rule, the MacKinlay and Pástor (2000) rule, and the Kan and Zhou (2007) rule—as a way to improve …

Go to article

Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh Jan 2011

Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On May 6, 2010, the U.S. equity markets experienced a brief but highly unusual drop in prices across a number of stocks and indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (see Figure 1) fell by approximately 9% in a matter of minutes, and several stocks were traded down sharply before recovering a short time later. The authors contend that the events of May 6, 2010 exhibit patterns consistent with the type of "flash crash" observed in their earlier study (2010). This paper describes the results of nine different simulations created by using a large-scale computer model to reconstruct the critical elements …

Go to article

Quantitative Hedge Fund Selection, Melvyn Teo Dec 2010

Quantitative Hedge Fund Selection, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Prior research has shown that small funds, young funds, and local funds outperform their older, larger, and distant counterparts. According to the literature, hedge fund performance is driven by fund capacity constraints, managerial incentives, and local information. I revisit these studies on hedge funds and test whether their results hold up in recent data. By doing so, I lay the foundations for a quantitative hedge fund selection framework.

Go to article

Private Banking In Asia: Going Beyond Trust And Confidence, Knowledge@Smu Nov 2010

Private Banking In Asia: Going Beyond Trust And Confidence, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Asia's private banking industry is expected to expand in the near future, and all signs point to greater competition amongst existing markets and wealth management entities. The nature of the financial service, however, remains rather interpersonal. Private bankers work almost exclusively with sophisticated, high net worth individuals. Long term survival, for them, means sticking with high value clients over the long haul, over and above sticking it out with the institutes that back those financial services. What might this spell for the market? SMU's Ang Ser-Keng asked industry experts through a series of interviews.

Go to article

Bayesian Analysis Of Structural Credit Risk Models With Microstructure Noises, Shirley J. Huang, Jun Yu Nov 2010

Bayesian Analysis Of Structural Credit Risk Models With Microstructure Noises, Shirley J. Huang, Jun Yu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique is developed for the Bayesian analysis of structural credit risk models with microstructure noises. The technique is based on the general Bayesian approach with posterior computations performed by Gibbs sampling. Simulations from the Markov chain, whose stationary distribution converges to the posterior distribution, enable exact finite sample inferences of model parameters. The exact inferences can easily be extended to latent state variables and any nonlinear transformation of state variables and parameters, facilitating practical credit risk applications. In addition, the comparison of alternative models can be based on devian information criterion …

Go to article

Do Foreign Institutions Improve Stock Liquity?, Chi Shen Wei Nov 2010

Do Foreign Institutions Improve Stock Liquity?, Chi Shen Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines whether capital flows by foreign institutions improve liquidity in domestic markets. I find that stocks with increased foreign institutional ownership subsequently experience higher liquidity. However, it is difficult to interpret this evidence as a causal relation because institutions tend to self-select into more liquid stocks. To solve this problem, I exploit the 2003 US dividend tax cut as a natural experiment. The results from a 2SLS (IV) regression confirm that liquidity improved more in dividend-paying stocks located in US tax-treaty countries compared to similar stocks located in non-treaty countries. These patterns are consistent with the notion that …

Go to article

Would Position Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh Nov 2010

Would Position Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On May 6, 2010, the US equity markets experienced a brief but highly unusual drop in prices across a number of stocks and indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell by approximately 9% in a matter of minutes, and several stocks were traded down sharply before recovering a short time later. Earlier research by Lee, Cheng and Koh (2010) identified the conditions under which a “flash crash” can be triggered by systematic traders running highly similar trading strategies, especially when they are “crowding out” other liquidity providers in the market. The authors contend that the events of May 6, …

Go to article

Hedge Funds And Analyst Optimism, Melvyn Teo Oct 2010

Hedge Funds And Analyst Optimism, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

We find that analysts are more likely to issue favorable recommendations for stocks predominantly owned hedge funds. Moreover, these optimistic recommendations translate into poorer stock performance over the next three to six months. Hedge funds take advantage of these flattering reports by concurrently offloading their stock holdings. Our results suggest that analysts are reluctant to downgrade stocks held by their most important clients.

Go to article

Wait Not For Another Crisis: Weighing In On The Fair Value Accounting Debate, Knowledge@Smu Oct 2010

Wait Not For Another Crisis: Weighing In On The Fair Value Accounting Debate, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

The use of fair value accounting – simply defined as the booking of numbers based on current market value – has been named as a catalyst in worsening the recent financial crisis. Emerging from the rubble, accounting regulators, like the IASB and FASB, together with industry players, are now trying to work out rules and standards. However, the question of to “fair” or not to “fair” is the subject of a hot debate. Columbia University’s Stephen Penman weighs in at a recent SMU lecture.

Go to article

Corporate Governance And Mindfulness: The Impact Of Management Accounting Systems Change, John Joseph Williams, Alfred E. Seaman Oct 2010

Corporate Governance And Mindfulness: The Impact Of Management Accounting Systems Change, John Joseph Williams, Alfred E. Seaman

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The International Federation of Accountants (2009) argues that a governance structure should go beyond conformance with regulations and equally support a performance dimension that can lead to better outcomes. This paper explores the relationship between these two governance dimensions and the capacity for mindfulness, utilizing organizational theory that describes high reliability organizations. Survey data was obtained from top-level accounting professionals in a sample of 124 Canadian firms. Regression results support the hypothesis that both the conformance and performance dimensions of governance are significant determinants of the capacity for mindfulness. Additional analysis shows that the explanatory power of this relationship persists …

Go to article

First Prev Next Last