Portfolio and Security Analysis Commons^™

Two Essays In Finance And Economics: “Investment Opportunities In Commodity And Stock Markets For G7 Countries” And “Global And Local Factors Affecting Sovereign Yield Spreads”, Selma Izadi

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In chapter 1, I investigate the return links and dynamic conditional correlations between the equity and commodity returns for G7 countries from 2000:01 to 2014:10. The commodity futures include BCOM Index which contains the futures and spot price of 22 commodities, Brent and Crude oil futures, gold and silver futures, Wheat, Corn and Soybean futures and CRB index. The finding indicates that during the full sample period GOLD, WHEAT and CORN have the smallest dynamic conditional correlations with all the Equity indexes. In addition, the correlations between the GOLD/Equity pairs are negative during the financial crisis. This fact indicates the …

Intraday Value-At-Risk: An Asymmetric Autoregressive Conditional Duration Approach, Shouwei Liu, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose to compute the Intraday Value-at-Risk (IVaR) for stocks using real-time transaction data. Tick-by-tick data filtered by price duration are modeled using a two-state asymmetric autoregressive conditional duration (AACD) model, and the IVaR is calculated using Monte Carlo simulation based on the estimated AACD model. Backtesting results for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) show that the IVaR calculated using the AACD method outperforms those using the Dionne et al. (2009) and Giot (2005) methods.

Institutional Trading During A Wave Of Corporate Scandals: 'Perfect Payday'?, Gennaro Bernile, Johan Sulaeman, Qin Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the role of institutional trading during the option backdating scandal of 2006-2007. Unlike their inability to anticipate other corporate events, institutional investors as a group display negative abnormal trading imbalances (i.e., buy minus sell volumes) in anticipation of firm-specific backdating exposures. Consistent with informed trading, the underlying trades earn positive abnormal short- and long-term profits. Moreover, the negative abnormal imbalances are larger in magnitude when backdating is likely a more severe issue. Local institutions, in particular, display negative trading imbalances earlier in event-time and earn consistently higher trading profits than non-local institutions. Although we find some evidence …

Trading Costs On The Stock Exchange Of Thailand, Nattawut Jenwittayaroje, Charlie Charoenwong, David K. Ding, Yung Chiang Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines the components of trading costs incurred in trading large and liquid stocks listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand. We find that aggressive orders pay an immediacy price measured by price impact, whereas executed passive orders gain the immediacy price. We also find a sizable opportunity cost from the unexecuted portion of a limit order that more than offsets the benefit obtained from the partial fulfillment of the order. The total trading cost, which includes price impact and opportunity cost, is positively related to order size and stock price volatility, but negatively associated with firm size, stock …

Loss Aversion, Adaptive Beliefs, And Asset Pricing Dynamics, Kamal Samy Selim Prof, Ahmed Eltabee Okasha Dr., Heba M. Ezzat Dr.

Business Administration

We study asset pricing dynamics in artificial financial markets model. The financial market is populated with agents following two heterogeneous trading beliefs, the technical and the fundamental prediction rules. Agents switch between trading rules with respect to their past performance. The agents are loss averse over asset price fluctuations. Loss aversion behaviour depends on the past performance of the trading strategies in terms of an evolutionary fitness measure. We propose a novel application of the prospect theory to agent-based modelling, and by simulation, the effect of evolutionary fitness measure on adaptive belief system is investigated. For comparison, we study pricing …

Tail Event Driven Asset Allocation: Evidence From Equity And Mutual Funds Markets, Wolfgang Karl Hardle, David K. C. Lee, Sergey Nasekin, Xinwen Ni, Alla Petukina

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The correlation structure across assets and opposite tail movements are essential to the asset allocation problem, since they determine the level of risk in a position. Correlation alone is not informative on the distributional details of the assets. Recently introduced TEDAS -Tail Event Driven ASset allocation approach determines the dependence between assets at tail measures. TEDAS uses adaptive Lasso based quantile regression in order to determine an active set of negative nonzero coefficients. Based on these active risk factors, an adjustment for intertemporal correlation is made. In this research authors aim to develop TEDAS, by introducing three TEDAS modifications differing …

Customer's Short Positions And Supplier's Investment Decisions, Xia Chen, Guojin Gong, Shuqing Luo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Short interest contains valuable information about a firm’s business fundamentals. We investigate whether such information affects business partners’ real investment decisions in the supply-chain setting. We predict and find that a supplier’s future investments (including inventory, R&D, and tangible asset investments) decrease with its customer’s current short interest. This negative relation is stronger when the supplier faces greater difficulty in assessing its customer’s business fundamentals and when short interest is more likely to indicate longlasting deterioration in the customer’s fundamentals. Additional analysis does not support the alternative explanation that the supplier adjusts investments in response to unfavorable information obtained via …

What Price Security?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Non-state actors have muddied the global security picture but the fundamental problems remain unchanged from those millenia ago

When Everyone Misses On The Same Side: Debiased Earnings Surprises And Stock Returns, Chin-Han Chiang, Wei Dai, Jianqing Fan, Harrison Hong, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In event studies of capital market efficiency, an earnings surprise has historically been measured by the consensus error, defined as earnings minus the consensus or average of professional forecasts. The rationale is that the consensus is an accurate measure of the market’s expectation of earnings. But since forecasts can be biased due to conflicts of interest and some investors can see through these conflicts, this rationale is flawed and the consensus error a biased measure of an earnings surprise. We show that the fraction of forecasts that miss on the same side (FOM), by ignoring the size of the misses, …

Does Brand Licensing Increase A Licensor's Shareholder Value?, Adina B. Robinson, Kapil R. Tuli, Ajay K. Kohli

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study examines 171 brand licensing announcements and subsequent changes in the licensor firms' shareholder values using the event study method. We find that although brand licensing announcements lead to positive abnormal returns on average, nearly 44% of the announcements in our sample are followed by negative abnormal returns. We argue that investors react more favorably to a brand licensing announcement when they believe (i) the brand has greater ability to stimulate licensee product sales (and thus generate higher royalties for the licensor) and (ii) the licensor firm has greater ability to limit licensee opportunism (and thus limit brand dilution …

Volatility And Risk Management In European Electricity Futures Markets, Jim Hanly, Lucia Morales

Articles

This paper estimates and applies a risk management strategy for electricity spot exposures using futures hedging. We apply our approach to three of the most actively traded European electricity markets, Nordpool, APXUK and Phelix. We compare both optimal hedging strategies and the hedging effectiveness of these markets for two hedging horizons, weekly and monthly using both Variance and Value at Risk (VaR). We find significant differences in both the Optimal Hedge Ratios (OHR’s) and the hedging effectiveness of the different electricity markets. Better performance is found for the Nordpool market while the poorest performer in hedging terms is Phelix. However …

My Experience With Fundamental Analysis, Nicolas Chapman

Honors Scholar Theses

In finance, there are several overarching schools of thought when viewing equity prices in the stock market, such as technical and fundamental analysis. I find the most enjoyment in quantitative matters, so naturally most of my experience with the stock market includes fundamental analysis. Proponents of this methodology purport that there is a true value of a security based on its financials, and that it will trade around that number eventually. Perhaps the most successful investor who uses fundamental analysis is Warren Buffett. Specifically, he believes in valuing a company’s equity by gauging their cash flows and projecting how they …

Investment Strategies Amongst Property And Casualty Insurance Companies, Ryan J. Conforti

Honors Scholar Theses

The purpose of this work is to take an in-depth look into the investment side of property and casualty insurance. Many P&C companies have thrived over the past century, and much of this success can be attributed to investment income. This thesis will examine how investment philosophy changes from firm to firm, while also looking at how strategies have changed over time. It will also look into the insurance “float,” and examine how investors such as Warren Buffett have utilized this instrument to their favor. Investing is a huge aspect of property and casualty insurance, and this piece will give …

Long-Term U.S. Cross-Border Security Flows With Developed And Emerging Market Countries Surrounding The Global Financial Crisis, Caitlin Tongco

Honors College Theses

This paper analyzes the impact of the global financial crisis on cross-border long-term security flows from and towards the U.S. We are investigating monthly observations from 72 countries over the period from 2003 to 2013. The findings show that the global financial crisis impacted all cross-border capital flows in our analysis; yet, the timing, the significance, and the nature of the impact varies among the different securities, as well as between a sample of developed and emerging market countries. We find evidence for a flight-to-safety with the start of the global financial crisis, with a significant, but short lived interruption …

The Discreet Trader, Seth Wing

Honors Projects in Finance

This paper examines insider trading, specifically trades by corporate insiders around quarterly earnings announcements. Announcements were broken up into three categories: earnings above analyst expectations, earnings below expectations, and earnings in line with expectations. Trade data was collected from the thirty companies of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 2012-’13. The trades were sorted by purchases and sales by date and analyzed with the earnings report of which the trades were made. Only trades in the interval from twenty days before the announcement date to twenty days after the announcement date were considered. The prediction was that corporate insiders would …

Institutional Shareholding And Information Content Of Dividend Surprises: Re-Examining The Dynamics In Dividend-Reappearance Era, Abu S. Amin, Shantanu Dutta, Samir Saadi, Premal P. Vora

WCBT Faculty Publications

We examine the role of institutional investors’ investment horizon on the information content associated with dividend announcement surprises in the “dividend-reappearance era”. We find that the presence of institutional investors negatively affects the announcement period cumulative abnormal return (CAR), which suggests that institutional investors reduce information content of dividend announcements. This result is primarily driven by the fact that institutional investors, especially the not-short-horizon investors, do not prefer dividend surprises – which leads to lower announcement period CAR. We do not find support for institutional investors’ informed trading argument. Our study reveals that in order to understand the dynamics between …

The Sfa Business Review Vol. 2 No. 2, M. Dudley Stewart, Ralph L. White, John H. Lewis, Danny R. Arnold, John D. Whitt, Patsy Spurrier, Janelle C. Ashley

Ralph E. White

No abstract provided.

Market Pricing Of Banks’ Fair Value Assets Reported Under Sfas 157 Since The 2008 Financial Crisis, Beng Wee Goh, Dan Li, Jeffrey Ng, Keng Kevin Ow Yong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We investigate how investors price the fair value estimates of assets as required by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157 (SFAS 157) since the financial crisis in 2008. We observe that Level 3 fair value estimates are typically priced lower than Level 1 and Level 2 fair value estimates between 2008 and 2011. However, the difference between the pricing of the different estimates reduces over time, suggesting that as market conditions stabilize in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, reliability concerns about Level 3 estimates dissipated to some extent. Next, we examine whether Level 3 gains affect the …

From Pit To Electronic Trading: Impact On Price Volatility, Lucjan T. Orlowski

WCBT Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the dynamics of price volatility and trading volume of 10-year U.S. Treasury note futures within the context of transition from pit to electronic trading. The analysis is conducted over four discernible phases of futures trading evolution: the pit-only phase, the leap to electronic trading, and the electronic trading dominant phase, which is divided further into two periods, the before and after the financial crisis of 2007/2009. Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity with in-mean conditional variance and generalized error distribution parameterization (GARCH-M-GED) tests are conducted to examine the conditional volatility of total returns index as a function of trading …

Performance Of Utility Based Hedges, Jim Hanly, John Cotter

Articles

Hedgers as investors are concerned with both risk and return. However when measuring hedging performance, the role of returns and investor risk aversion has generally been neglected in the literature, by its focus on minimum variance hedging. In this paper we address this by using utility based performance metrics to evaluate the hedging effectiveness of utility based hedges for hedgers with both moderate and high risk aversion together with the more traditional minimum variance approach. To examine this for an energy hedger, we apply our approach to WTI Crude Oil, for three different hedging horizons, daily, weekly and monthly. We …

Singapore Budget 2015: Building Our Future, Strengthening Social Security, Clarence Goh, Felix Wong

Research Collection School of Accountancy

Our Budget for FY2014 is expected to record a slightly smallerdeficit than what we had estimated a year ago. We had budgetedfor an overall deficit of $1.2 billion (or 0.3% of GDP). We nowexpect a very small deficit of $0.1 billion, close to a balancedposition.

Corporate Social Performance, Analyst Stock Recommendations, And Firm Future Returns, Xueming Luo, Heli Wang, Sascha Raithel, Qinqin Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study posits that security analysts heed corporate social performance information and factor it into their recommendations to general investors. In particular, as corporate social performance is often uncertain and ambiguous to general investors, analysts may serve as the informational pathway connecting corporate social performance to firm stock returns. Thus, we argue that analyst recommendations mediate the relationship between corporate social performance and firm stock returns. On the basis of not only a qualitative study with literature searches and interviews of stock analysts but also a quantitative study with two longitudinal samples of large firms, we find support for these …

Beyond Ss: An Analysis Of Alternative Risk Measures, Jai Kedia

Senior Independent Study Theses

Investors require a return from investing in stock securities that adequately compensate the investors for the risk level assumed. Therefore, any calculation of expected returns from a stock requires knowledge of the risk of the security. While there is no strong consensus on an ideal risk measure, traditionally risk has been conceptualized as volatility and is measured by the ß of the stock or portfolio. This paper hypothesizes that alternative risk measures such as higher order moments, size, leverage, and price-to-book value add explanatory power to the ß when predicting stock returns. Empirical analysis is conducted using both regression and …

Market Microstructure And Abnormal Returns: An Analysis Of Nyse And Sgx Securities, Alex Ng

Honors Theses

This paper investigates the differences in the abnormal returns of securities in the context of the earnings announcement in both the United States (NYSE) and Singapore (SGX) markets[1]. Despite the similarities between both exchanges, there exist two key market microstructure differences: the free float factor (i.e. the portion of listed share capital that is freely traded on the market) and lot size (i.e. the minimum number of shares that an investor can trade in a single transaction). While the difference in the lot size can be attributed to the intrinsic institutional differences between both exchanges, the involvement of …

The Broken Buck Stops Here: Embracing Sponsor Support In Money Market Fund Reform, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman bankruptcy contributed to a freeze in the credit markets. In response, MMFs were deemed a component of the nefarious shadow banking industry and targeted for regulatory reform. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) misguided 2014 reforms responded by potentially exacerbating MMF fragility while potentially crippling large segments of the MMF industry.

Determining the …

Asset Allocation In The Chinese Stock Market: The Role Of Return Predictability, Jian Chen, Fuwei Jiang, Jun Tu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this article the authors investigate asset allocation in the Chinese stock market from the perspective of incorporating return predictability. Based on a host of return predictors, they find significant out-of-sample return predictability in the Chinese stock market. They then examine the performance of active portfolio strategies—such as aggregate market timing as well as industry, size, and value-rotation strategies—designed to profitably exploit return predictability. Strong evidence is found by the authors that these portfolio strategies incorporating return predictability can deliver superior performance—up to 600 basis points per annum and almost double the Sharpe ratios—compared with the passive buy-and-hold benchmarks that …

Limited Attention, Marital Events, And Hedge Funds, Yan Lu, Sugata Ray, Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We explore the impact of limited attention on investment performance by analyzing the returns of hedge fund managers who are distracted by personal events such as marriage and divorce. We find that marriages and divorces are associated with significantly lower fund alpha, during the six-month period surrounding the event and for up to two years after the event. Relative to the pre-event window, fund alpha falls by an annualized 8.50 percent during a marriage and 7.39 percent during a divorce. Busy fund managers who manage larger funds and engage in high tempo investment strategies are more affected by marriage. Fund …

Semi-Universal Portfolios With Transaction Costs, Dingjiang Huang, Yan Zhu, Bin Li, Shuigeng Zhou, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online portfolio selection (PS) has been extensively studied in artificial intelligence and machine learning communities in recent years. An important practical issue of online PS is transaction cost, which is unavoidable and nontrivial in real financial trading markets. Most existing strategies, such as universal portfolio (UP) based strategies, often rebalance their target portfolio vectors at every investment period, and thus the total transaction cost increases rapidly and the final cumulative wealth degrades severely. To overcome the limitation, in this paper we investigate new investment strategies that rebalances its portfolio only at some selected instants. Specifically, we design a novel on-line …

Vine Copula Modelling Of Dependence And Portfolio Optimization With Application To Mining And Energy Stock Return Series From The Australian Market, Jose Arreola Hernandez

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis models the dependence risk profile, investment risk and portfolio allocation features of seven 20-stock portfolios from the mining, energy, retail and manufacturing sectors of the Australian market in the context of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis (2008-2009 GFC) and pre-GFC, GFC, post-GFC and full sample period scenarios revolving around it. The mining and energy portfolios are the base of the study, while the retail and manufacturing are considered for benchmarking purposes. Pair vine copula models including canonical vines (c-vines), drawable vines (d-vines) and regular vines (r-vines) are fitted for the analysis of …