Portfolio and Security Analysis Commons^™

Analyst Price Target Expected Returns And Option Implied Risk, Turan G. Bali, Jianfeng Hu, Scott Murray

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Motivated by the nature of asset pricing models, we investigate the cross-sectional relation between the market's ex-ante view of a stock's risk and the stock's ex-ante expected return. We demonstrate that an ex-ante measure of expected returns based on analyst price targets is highly related to the market's required rate of return. Using this measure, we show that ex-ante measures of volatility, skewness, and kurtosis derived from option prices are positively related to ex-ante expected returns. We then decompose the risk measures into systematic and unsystematic components and find that while expected returns are related to both systematic and unsystematic …

Three Essays On Hedge Funds, Liping Qiu

Doctoral Dissertations

In Essay 1, we find that, on average, hedge funds decrease leverage prior to the beginning of the financial crisis, with leverage remaining below the pre-crisis levels. We also find that younger funds with lower current leverage and stricter fund governance are more likely to increase leverage following favorable performance; funds exposed to higher risk, higher management fee and higher current leverage tend to delever. Managers increase leverage in order to enhance future performance following superior returns only to be disappointed. We find mixed evidence on the performance difference between levered and unlevered funds, but levered funds do survive longer. …

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

David J Brooks Dr.

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, …

Building And Testing A Portfolio Of Marijuana Stocks: Why U.S. Sec Trading Suspensions Might Cause Some To Crash Before (Or After) Reaching New High, Anthony J. Cataldo Ii, Thomas Miller, Glenn S. Soltis, Brian J. Halsey

Accounting Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Research In Credit Risk Of Shipping Enterprises Based On The Kmv Model, Yannan Wu

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Share-Price-Changes-Volume Relation On The Singapore Equity Market, David K. C. Lee, Mohamed Ariff

David LEE Kuo Chuen

A critical review of the literature on security-price-changes-volume research suggests that the published studies in the United States and one each in Hong Kong and Japan have largely ignored the impacts on the results from autocorrelation, non-normality of distributions, heteroscedasticity and non-linear functional forms. Therefore, the reported findings are not robust. In testing for this relation from a small sample of continuously traded shares in the Singapore share market, we find that consistent results may not be obtained because of violations of basic test conditions. A task that remains is an application of alternative test models with data transformation using …

The Risk-Relevance Of Securitizations During The Recent Financial Crisis, Yiwei Dou, Yanju Liu, Gordon Richardson, Dushyantkumar Vyas

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We investigate changes in the risk-relevance of securitized subprime, other nonconforming, and commercial mortgages for sponsor-originators during the recent financial crisis. Using the volatility of realized stock returns, option-implied volatility, and credit spreads, we observe a pronounced increase in the risk-relevance of subprime securitizations as early as 2006. Furthermore, reflecting the evolution of the financial crisis in waves, we find that investors recognized the increased credit risk of other nonconforming and commercial mortgage securitizations as the financial crisis progressed. Additional analyses show that risk-relevance varies cross-sectionally with structural characteristics such as monoline credit-enhancement and the presence of special servicers for …

Industry-Based Style Investing, Russell Jame, Qing Tong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Motivated by the style investing model of Barberis and Shleifer (2003), we examine the industry-wide investment decisions of retail investors. We find that retail investor industry demand is highly correlated and strongly related to past industry returns. Moreover, industries heavily bought by retail investors over the past year significantly underperform industries heavily sold over the subsequent year. Similarly, stocks in industries heavily bought by retail investors underperform stocks in industries heavily sold, even after controlling for firm-level demand. Our results suggest that industry-wide categorization influences the investment decisions of retail investors and has a significant impact on asset prices.

Real Estate Investment By Bank Holding Companies And Their Risk And Return: Nonparametric And Garch Procedures, Scott Deacle, Elyas Elyasiani

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

We investigate the association between real estate investment by US Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) and their return, risk and risk-adjusted returns. Three portfolios are formed of BHCs according to whether they do or do not invest in real estate, strictness of the regulation on real estate investment and the ratio of real estate investment to assets. Wilcoxon tests of differences in portfolio returns, risk, risk-adjusted returns and value at risk between each pair of portfolios are conducted to determine how engagement in real estate, stricter regulation and increased real estate investment affect BHC performance. These effects are also investigated within …

How Do Bond Specific, Firm Specific And Macroeconomic Factors Influence Corporate Credit Spreads?, Michael Mayberger

Honors Projects

The recession of 2008-2009 showcased the critical role that the corporate bond market plays in providing firms with access to capital, a role reflected by a 300% increase in corporate bonds issued from $600 billion issued in 2007 to $1.8 trillion issued in 2012. In this study, I investigate the bond specific, firm specific and macroeconomic factors that explain the change in corporate credit spreads within the Consumer Staples industry between 2005 and 2013. The results show that the firm specific variables, debt and total assets, have the largest impact on the corporate credit spreads. However, there is a weaker …

Indefinite Knapsack Separable Quadratic Programming: Methods And Applications, Jaehwan Jeong

Doctoral Dissertations

Quadratic programming (QP) has received significant consideration due to an extensive list of applications. Although polynomial time algorithms for the convex case have been developed, the solution of large scale QPs is challenging due to the computer memory and speed limitations. Moreover, if the QP is nonconvex or includes integer variables, the problem is NP-hard. Therefore, no known algorithm can solve such QPs efficiently. Alternatively, row-aggregation and diagonalization techniques have been developed to solve QP by a sub-problem, knapsack separable QP (KSQP), which has a separable objective function and is constrained by a single knapsack linear constraint and box constraints. …

Is Sin Always A Sin? The Interaction Effect Of Social Norms And Financial Incentives On Market Participants’ Behavior, Yanju Liu, Hai Lu, Kevin Veenstra

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using alcohol, tobacco, and gaming consumption data and people’s attitudes toward these sin products to proxy for social norm acceptance levels, we show a strong interaction effect between social norms and financial incentives, which significantly influence the behavior of market participants. Specifically, institutional investors’ shareholdings and analyst coverage of sin companies increase with the degree of social norm acceptance. The association between shareholdings/coverage and social norm acceptance is less pronounced for firms with higher future expected performance. Our results show that social norms and financial incentives have a powerful interaction effect in determining the behavior of market participants, suggesting that …

Impact Of The Financial Crisis On Derivative Valuation, Samuel M. Berklacich

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Tracking Errors Of Exchange Traded Funds And Index Funds, Rupendra Paliwal

WCBT Working Papers

Exchange traded funds (ETF) are one of the recent financial innovations widely viewed as significantly better investments than mutual funds given their lower fee structure and tax efficiency. Individual investors are increasingly using ETFs tracking most popular stock indices to achieve their investment goals. In some cases, investors are using these ETFs to replace index mutual funds in their long-term portfolios. Thus, it is important to compare the performance of widely held ETFs and index funds in terms of their ability to consistently track the underlying index. Another interesting research question is whether tracking errors of these two investment vehicles …

Forecasting The Equity Risk Premium: The Role Of Technical Indicators, Christopher J. Neely, David E. Rapach, Jun Tu, Guofu Zhou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Academic research relies extensively on macroeconomic variables to forecast the U.S. equity risk premium, with relatively little attention paid to the technical indicators widely employed by practitioners. Our paper fills this gap by comparing the predictive ability of technical indicators with that of macroeconomic variables. Technical indicators display statistically and economically significant in-sample and out-of-sample predictive power, matching or exceeding that of macroeconomic variables. Furthermore, technical indicators and macroeconomic variables provide complementary information over the business cycle: technical indicators better detect the typical decline in the equity risk premium near business-cycle peaks, whereas macroeconomic variables more readily pick up the …

Does Option Trading Convey Stock Price Information?, Jianfeng Hu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

After executing option orders, options market makers turn to the stock market to hedge away the underlying stock exposure. As a result, the stock exposure imbalance in option transactions translates into an imbalance in stock transactions. This paper decomposes the total stock order imbalance into an imbalance induced by option transactions and an imbalance independent of options. The analysis shows that the option-induced imbalance significantly predicts future stock returns in the cross section, but the imbalance independent of options only has a transitory price impact. Further investigation suggests that options order flow contains important information about the underlying stock value.

Trading Intraday Volatility, Treavor Dodsworth

Honors Program Projects

Many people believe that there is no way to profit off of anomalies in the markets because the markets are either completely random or they always accurately reflect outside information and events. Others, however, believe that models can be found through historical testing that successfully beat the market (Williams, 2011, p. 13-15). This thesis presents a method for beating the market by trading intraday volatility. The researcher focused on trading corn futures contracts. A futures contract is simply a derivative that can be bought and sold. It represents an agreement to buy or sell at a future date. Futures contracts …

The Price Discovery Puzzle In Offshore Yuan Trading: Different Contributions For Different Contracts, David K. Ding, Yiuman Tse, Michael R. Williams

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The People's Bank of China (PBC) lifted yuan trading restrictions in July of 2010 that led to offshore yuan spot trading in Hong Kong. Based on causality analyses, we find that price discovery is absent between the onshore and offshore spot markets. However, we document the presence of price discovery between onshore spot and offshore nondeliverable forward (NDF) rates. These seemingly inconsistent results present a puzzle wherein one offshore market appears to be more informationally integrated with the onshore market than another. We conclude that price discovery differences in the offshore markets stem from the offshore spot and forward contracts …

Cybersecurity Strategy In Developing Nations: A Jamaica Case Study, Kevin Patrick Newmeyer

2010-2016 Archived Posters

Developing nations have been slow to develop and implement cybersecurity strategies despite a growing threat to governance and public security. This qualitative case study examined how the government and private sector in Jamaica viewed the state of cybersecurity in the country, and how the country was developing policy to respond to cyber threats.

The Limits Of The Market-Wide Limits Of Arbitrage: Insights From The Dynamics Of 100 Anomalies, Hieiko Jacobs

Research Collection BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre

Are anomalies strongest when limits of arbitrage are widely considered to be greatest? We empirically explore this theoretically deducted prediction. We first identify, categorize, and replicate 100 anomalies in the cross-section of expected equity returns. We then comprehensively study their dynamic interaction with popular proxies for time-varying market-level arbitrage conditions. Our findings reveal a surprisingly weak role of commonly employed measures of market-wide arbitrage risks and constraints. Even though this “big picture” evidence is by no means conclusive, our findings might potentially be best interpreted as supporting the growing literature which uncovers some shortcomings of the limits to arbitrage argument.

Does Beating Cash Flow Benchmarks Reduce The Cost Of Debt?, Mauricio A. Melgarejo

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

This paper examines whether beating previous year cash flow values and analysts' cash flow forecasts impact the firms' cost of debt. Creditors are expected to be more concerned about firm solvency than firm profitability. Accordingly, if lenders have any reference point it may be related to cash flow numbers. This study finds that firms that beat analysts' cash flow forecasts have smaller initial bond yield spreads in the next period and a decrease in their initial bond yield spreads between consecutive periods. This effect is more pronounced at short maturities and for observations with less informative earnings. Firms with lower …

Major Personal Finance Faq, Richard H. Serlin

Richard H. Serlin

A rare source of detailed, extensive, state of the art answers to some of the most important questions in personal finance.

Be Smart: Focus On Processes And Diversify, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Hedge fund managers have plenty to think about today as China transitions to a consumption-driven economy, bank financing dries up, and Washington lurches along a rocky road.

How Large Are The Benefits Of Emerging Market Equities?, C. Mitchell Conover, Gerald R. Jensen, Robert R. Johnson

Finance Faculty Publications

We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits of emerging market equities by extending previous research in four fundamental ways. The contribution of this study is that it 1) evaluates a more complete sample; 2) examines performance measures that account for asymmetric return distributions; 3) separates emerging markets by region; and 4) considers the influence that the market environment has on the benefits of emerging market investments. Our results suggest that previous research has understated the benefits associated with investing in emerging markets. We find that broad emerging market indices have relatively low downside risk, which results in Sortino ratios …

The January Effect: A Test Of Market Efficiency, Shelby Klock

Theses & Honors Papers

The purpose of this study is to test the weakform efficient market hypothesis by analyzing the effects of year end selling/buying and the January effect on stock price. Specifically, is itpossible to earn an above normal return at the beginning of the new year? Numerous past studies suggest that at year end investors sell underperforming stocks, thus negatively impacting stock price . Past studies also suggest the repurchase of previou$ year losers in January causing upward pressure on stock price. According to the weakform efficient market hypothesis, it is not possible to outperform the market …

Online Portfolio Selection: A Survey, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online portfolio selection is a fundamental problem in computational finance, which has been extensively studied across several research communities, including finance, statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey and a structural understanding of online portfolio selection techniques published in the literature. From an online machine learning perspective, we first formulate online portfolio selection as a sequential decision problem, and then we survey a variety of state-of-the-art approaches, which are grouped into several major categories, including benchmarks, Follow-the-Winner approaches, Follow-the-Loser approaches, Pattern-Matching--based approaches, and Meta-Learning Algorithms. In addition to the problem formulation …

Evaluating Retirement Planning : The Proper Mix Of Investments?, Woodrow D. Richardson, Rachel Graefe-Anderson

Business Faculty Research

This decision-based case developed from primary sources utilizes disguised names, but actual data to afford students the opportunity to evaluate and suggest changes to a real retirement portfolio. Leon and Billie Reynolds have asked their niece, Stacie, to review their retirement planning. The couple has accumulated just over $1,000,000 in investments with Teachers Insurance Annuity Association (TIAA) and College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF). The case gives the couple’s net worth, current salaries, insights into their spending habits, target retirement ages, family situation, and current allocations of their retirement funds. The case asks students to apply his or her financial planning …

An Analysis Of Bitcoin Market Efficiency Through Measures Of Short-Horizon Return Predictability And Market Liquidity, William L. Brown

CMC Senior Theses

Bitcoins have the potential to fundamentally change the way value is transferred globally. Their rapid adoption over the past four years has led many to consider the possible results of such a technology. To be a viable currency, however, it is imperative that the market for trading Bitcoins is efficient. By examining the changes in availability of predictable outsized returns and market liquidity over time, this paper examines historical Bitcoin market efficiency and establishes correlations between market liquidity, price predictability, and return data. The results provide insight into the turbulent nature of Bitcoin market efficiency over the past years, but …

Why Do Retail Investors Make Costly Mistakes? An Experiment On Mutual Fund Choice, Jill E. Fisch, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve diversification, and payment of excessive fund fees. Over the past thirty-five years, however, participant-directed 401(k) plans have largely replaced professionally managed pension plans, requiring unsophisticated retail investors to navigate the financial markets themselves. Policy-makers have struggled with regulatory interventions designed to improve the quality of investment decisions without a clear understanding of the reasons for investor mistakes. Absent such an understanding, it is difficult to design effective regulatory responses.

This article offers a first step in understanding the investor decision-making process. We use an internet-based …

Us Real Estate Investment Performance: 1983-2012, John F. Kerrigan

Honors Theses and Capstones

This study provides an overview of real estate investment performance over a 1983-2012 time period. The results show that although equity REITs outperformed all other assets on average annual return, on a risk-adjusted basis both private retail and apartment real estate outperformed all other assets. The study also found a recent trend in increased correlation between common stocks and REITs.