Portfolio and Security Analysis Commons^™

Two Essays In Empirical Asset Pricing, Abdullah M. Noman

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay investigates the ability of prior returns, relative to some aggregate market returns, to predict future returns on industry style portfolios. By pooling time series of returns across industries for the period between July 1969 and June 2012, we find that prior returns differential predicts one month ahead returns negatively, even in the presence of a set of popular state variables. The predictability remains significant and negative for up to 5 month ahead returns. The predictability is shown to be robust to alternative specifications, estimation methodology and industry classifications. A possible explanation …

Institutional Presence, Johan Sulaeman, Chi Shen Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose an Institutional Presence (IP) measure to capture the latent role of non-owner institutional investors who nevertheless may be observing a firm. We employ this measure to examine whether the ‘presence’ of institutional investors reduces information asymmetry in the market. Firms in areas with high institutional presence experience higher liquidity, faster information incorporation, lower costs of equity capital, and less financing frictions relative to firms in low IP areas. The results hold after controlling for firm and geographical characteristics including institutional ownership and urban locality. Our findings indicate that being in the presence of institutional investors brings tangible benefits.

Institutional Trading Frictions, Chiraphol New Chiyachantana, Pankaj K. Jain

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose and empirically examine a comprehensive measure of institutional trading frictions to include the dimensions of price impact, quantity of execution, return dynamics, speed of execution or order splitting, and trading commissions. Our empirical analysis reveals that various hidden components of institutional trading frictions such as adverse selection and clean-up costs are persistent and could add significantly to previously measured directly observable components of transaction costs. Our simultaneous system of equations accounts for the endogeniety in institutional order aggressiveness based on potentially superior information as well as order splitting strategies in the implementation stage to reduce transaction costs. Order …

Stock Liquidity And The Pricing Of Earnings: A Comparison Of China’S Floating And Non-Floating Shares, Lou Fang, Jiwei Wang, Hongqi Yuan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The reform to convert non-floating shares to floating in China provides a setting in which shares are subject to different liquidity constraint. We show that the severity of this constraint is inversely related to the extent to which earnings information is reflected in the share prices. Specifically, before the reform, the transfer prices of non-floating shares reflect much less earnings information than the market prices of floating shares. After the reform, however, both types of transfer reflect more earnings information, although the weights are still less than that found in the market prices. Thus, China's unique setting shows that share …

Investor Heterogeneity, Investor-Management Disagreement And Share Repurchases, Sheng Huang, Anjan V. Thakor

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper develops and tests a new theoretical explanation for stock repurchases. Investors may disagree with the manager about the firm's investment projects. A repurchase causes a change in the investor base as investors who are most likely to disagree with the manager tender their shares. Therefore, a firm is more likely to buy back shares when the level of investor-management agreement is lower, and agreement improves as a consequence. Moreover, dispersion of opinion among investors cannot explain repurchase activity once the stock price and investor-management agreement are controlled for. Overall, the evidence is consistent with firms strategically using repurchases …

Leverage Buy-Out Case Study, Binh Duc Nguyen

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Ias 39 Reclassification Choice And Analyst Earnings Forecast Properties, Chee Yeow Lim, Chu Yeong Lim, Gerald J. Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In October 2008, the International Accounting Standards Board amended IAS 39 to allow banks to retroactively reclassify financial assets that previously were measured at fair value to amortized cost. By reclassifying financial assets, a bank can potentially avoid recognizing the unrealized fair value losses and thereby increase its income and regulatory capital during a market downturn. We examine the implications of the reclassification decision by banks for the properties of financial analyst earnings forecasts during 2008–2009, when economic conditions were highly volatile. We find that the reclassification choice during the financial crisis reduced analyst forecast accuracy and increased forecast dispersion. …

Selective Intervention And Economic Re-Engineering: Lessons Form Singapore's Parks In Indonesia And India, Caroline Yeoh, Siang Yeung Wong

Caroline Yeoh

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Financial Market Development On Holdings Of Us Assets And Equity Carve-Outs And Macroeconomic Activity, Ravigsida Dorcas Compaore

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation examines the impact of financial development on different countries holdings of U.S securities. The difference between the US weight in the global market capitalization and the US weight in developed and developing countries is tested through a panel data analysis. We find that most countries tend to overweight their US debt portfolio which is strongly related to their financial market development. When holdings of US debts and equity are low, financial market development is high; in developing countries, holding less US equity in their portfolio causes country to get better financial development. In developed …

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

WCBT 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 that increased …

How Diversified Is Your Equity Portfolio?, Bruce Vanstone

Bruce Vanstone

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 (PhD)

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 get …

The Intangibles Of M&A Deals, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

You have worked hard to buy over a company; you have to work harder now to avoid seeing its value disappear

Stock Picking, Industry Picking And Market Timing In Sell-Side Research, Ohad Kadan, Leonardo Madureira, Rong Wang, Tzachi Zach

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Sell-side analysts employ different benchmarks when defining their stock recommendations. For example, a ‘buy’ for some brokers means the stock is expected to outperform its peers in the same sector (“industry benchmarkers”), while for other brokers it means the stock is expected to outperform the market (“market benchmarkers”), or just some absolute return (“total benchmarkers”). We use these benchmarks to analyze the role of stock picking, industry picking and market timing in contributing to the performance of stock recommendations. We are able to do so given that different benchmarks suggest the use of different sets of abilities. Analysis of the …

Shackling Short Sellers: The 2008 Shorting Ban, Ekkehart Boehmer, Charles M. Jones, Xiaoyan Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In September 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) temporarily banned most short sales in nearly 1,000 financial stocks. We examine the ban's effect on market quality, shorting activity, the aggressiveness of short sellers, and stock prices. The ban's effects are concentrated in larger stocks; there is little effect on firms in the lower half of the size distribution. Although shorting activity drops by about 77% in large-cap stocks, stock prices appear unaffected by the ban. All but the smallest quartile of firms subject to the ban suffer a severe degradation in market quality.

Examining The Informational Role Of Analysts’ Forecasts And Its Impact On The Relation Between Earnings Surprises And Investors’ Responses, Joonho Lee, Kevin Ow Yong, Clement Michael

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Prior research documents the existence of two distinct post-earnings-announcement-drifts. Interestingly, investors seem to underreact more toward analyst-based earnings surprises than toward seasonal random walk earnings surprises. In this paper, we measure the extent of investors’ delayed reaction relative to the total market response to the earnings surprises. Using this measure, we find that investors react proportionately faster and more thoroughly to analyst-based earnings surprises than to random walk earnings surprises, suggesting that analyst-based earnings surprises are relatively less related with a delayed investor reaction compared with random walk earnings surprises. We also find that as the informativeness of analyst earnings …

An Analysis Of Extreme Price Shocks And Illiquidity Among Systematic Trend Followers, Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Shih-Fen Cheng

We construct an agent-based model to study the interplay between extreme price shocks and illiquidity in the presence of systematic traders known as trend followers. The agent-based approach is particularly attractive in modeling commodity markets because the approach allows for the explicit modeling of production, capacities, and storage constraints. Our study begins by using the price stream from a market simulation involving human participants and studies the behavior of various trend-following strategies, assuming initially that their participation will not impact the market. We notice an incremental deterioration in strategy performance as and when strategies deviate further and further from the …

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

Shih-Fen CHENG

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, …

An Analysis Of Extreme Price Shocks And Illiquidity Among Systematic Trend Followers, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Shih-Fen Cheng

We construct an agent-based model to study the interplay between extreme price shocks and illiquidity in the presence of systematic traders known as trend followers. The agent-based approach is particularly attractive in modeling commodity markets because the approach allows for the explicit modeling of production, capacities, and storage constraints. Our study begins by using the price stream from a market simulation involving human participants and studies the behavior of various trend-following strategies, assuming initially that their participation will not impact the market. We notice an incremental deterioration in strategy performance as and when strategies deviate further and further from the …

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

Shih-Fen CHENG

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 …

An Agent-Based Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng, Yee Pin Lim

Shih-Fen CHENG

In this paper, an event-centric commodity trading simulation powered by the multiagent framework is presented. The purpose of this simulation platform is for training novice traders. The simulation is progressed by announcing news events that affect various aspects of the commodity supply chain. Upon receiving these events, market agents that play the roles of producers, consumers, and speculators would adjust their views on the market and act accordingly. Their actions would be based on their roles and also their private information, and collectively they shape the market dynamics. This simulation has been effectively deployed for several training sessions. We will …

European Stock Market Contagion During Sovereign Debt Crisis And The Effects Of Macroeconomic Announcements On The Correlations Of Gold,Dollar And Stock Returns, Ziyu Li

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation examines the presence of the financial contagion across European stock markets with respect to the Greece sovereign debt crisis by estimating the time-varying conditional correlations of stock returns between Greece and other European countries over 2001 to 2012. We find that the correlations vary over time and reach the peaks in the late 2008 during theU.S.subprime crisis, and in the beginning of 2010 of the height of European debt crisis. Further, the correlations between stock index returns of Greece and Spain, France, Ireland, Netherlands are significantly increased by Greek sovereign credit rating downgrade announcements. …

Level Crossing Times In Mathematical Finance, Ofosuhene Osei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Level crossing times and their applications in finance are of importance, given certain threshold levels that represent the "desirable" or "sell" values of a stock. In this thesis, we make use of Wald's lemmas and various deep results from renewal theory, in the context of finance, in modelling the growth of a portfolio of stocks. Several models are employed .

How Important Are Earnings Announcements As An Information Source?, Sudipta Basu, Truong Duong, Stanimir Markov, Eng Joo Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a competitive information market, no single information source is likely to dominate all other sources collectively, but a single source can dominate all or most other sources individually. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar’s R2 metric: the proportion of the variation in annual returns explained by earnings announcement returns. We find that earnings announcement R2 is 11% -- higher than the corresponding R2 of returns on days with dividend announcements, management forecasts, preannouncements, 10-K and 10-Q filings and amendments. Only the four largest realized absolute daily returns in a year match …

Uncovering Hedge Fund Skill From The Portfolio Holdings They Hide, Vikas Agarwal, Wei Jiang, Yuehua Tang, Baozhong Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper studies the “confidential holdings” of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Funds managing large risky portfolios with nonconventional strategies seek confidentiality more frequently. Stocks in these holdings are disproportionately associated with information-sensitive events or share characteristics indicating greater information asymmetry. Confidential holdings exhibit superior performance up to 12 months, and tend to take longer to build. Together the evidence supports private information and the associated price impact as the dominant motives for confidentiality.

American Consumer Confidence & Income: Relationship With The Stock Market, Caitlin C. Tappan

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Short Selling And The Price Discovery Process, Ekkehart Boehmer, Juan Julie Wu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that stock prices are more accurate when short sellers are more active. First, in a large panel of NYSE-listed stocks, intraday informational efficiency of prices improves with greater shorting flow. Second, at monthly and annual horizons, more shorting flow accelerates the incorporation of public information into prices. Third, greater shorting flow reduces post-earnings-announcement drift for negative earnings surprises. Fourth, short sellers change their trading around extreme return events in a way that aids price discovery and reduces divergence from fundamental values. These results are robust to various econometric specifications, and their magnitude is economically meaningful.

Dividend Policy And Stock Price Volatility In The U.S. Equity Capital Market, Kyle A. Profilet

Theses & Honors Papers

What factors affect the volatility of a stock's price over time? What specific financial factors lead a stock to be more volatile than others? This study attempts to identify the impact of certain financial variables on the volatility of a stock's price overtime by analyzing the.financial data of over 500 publicly traded.firms found through the Value Line Investment Survey database using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Regression. The study tests the effects of financial variables (deemed appropriate by the finance literature) on stock price volatility (as measured by the stock's standard deviation) for a sample of firms screened.from the Value …