Browsing: Finance & Economics

A little over a year ago, the Bank for International Settlements announced its 11th Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Over the Counter Derivatives Market Activity. In recent days, Pragma Securities has referenced those BIS numbers in explaining the market for its latest service, an expansion of PragmaRead More

Ever since the 1930s, scholars have discussed the “agency problem” built into the structure of publicly owned corporations. This was a theme of Ronald Coase’s landmark article, “The nature of the firm” in 1937. Shareholders presumably want a company managed in a way that maximizes their – the shareholders’ –Read More

It is clear by now to even the most hardened skeptic that cryptocurrency, the class of assets of which bitcoin is the paradigm, is much more than a passing fad. Yes, the field may once have been too closely associated with survivalists, cranks, and bit players in the story ofRead More

Nathan Swem, an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, has written a paper on an always fascinating subject: the flow of information in financial markets. The point, in successful equity trading for example, isn’t merely “who you know?” Nor is it “what you know.” It’sRead More

It was a fairly routine item about an accomplished executive changing jobs in the asset management industry, but it caught my eye. A March 2017 news item said that Andrew Reid, until recently the head of corporate pension origination at Deutsche Bank, had left that post to work with InsightRead More

Charles Roth, of Thornburg Investment Management, has made the case that markets have over-reacted to the recent political shake-up in South Africa, driving asset prices below their underlying value. Thus (although Roth doesn’t put the point quite this bluntly) this could be a time for some bargain hunting.  Finance MinistryRead More

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Czyzewski v. Jevic Holding Corp. matters to hedge funds pursuing a distressed assets strategy, because the Justices have now made it more clear than they had before that the absolute priority rule under the U.S. bankruptcy code’s chapter 11 is … absolute. ItRead More

Anthony Davidow, vice president, alternative beta and asset allocation strategist, Charles Schwab, offers a valuable re-examination of modern portfolio theory in an article for Investments & Wealth Monitor. Davidow begins at the beginning. Harry Markowitz called diversification “the only free lunch in finance.” The idea is that by diversifying, anRead More

Deloitte proposes that the Swiss Confederation has a key role to play in the continued development of blockchain. In a new whitepaper, Deloitte makes this case based on Switzerland’s “special position as a global innovation centre.” There are six sides to Switzerland’s position: its FinTech infrastructure; its start-up attractiveness; itsRead More

The European Central Bank’s financial stability review, published in November 2016, predicts “steady, but modest, euro area economic recovery, despite continued headwinds.” The review is designed to assist Europe’s policy making authorities by providing information about the bank’s microprudential and macroprudential roles, along with the risks and vulnerabilities of theRead More

In a new paper David Blitz, the head of quantitative strategies for Robeco Asset Management, crunches numbers and reaches a surprising conclusion, precisely contrary to an intuitively appealing theory about the low volatility anomaly.  But … let’s begin from the beginning. Standard financial economic theory holds that investors are compensatedRead More

The median performance of active fund managers with a small-cap mandate is uniformly better than the performance of their colleagues with a large cap mandate against their respective benchmarks. Fewer than 40% of large-cap managers outperform U.S. large-cap equity. More than 60% of their small-cap counterparts do so. The patternRead More

Earnings releases, and the “seasons” made up out of them, have become almost a comforting ritual in the investment world. The days leading up to a company’s release often incites a good deal of more or less well-informed guesswork. That guesswork may become significantly more informed through crowdsourcing. That isRead More

In the politically charged atmosphere of our day, especially in the United States since the most recent presidential inauguration, it would be unwise to presume that hedge fund managers are exempt from political cognitive biases, or that these biases leave their portfolio decisions unaffected. Marian Moszoro and Michael Bykhovsky co-wroteRead More

A year ago, in a report on Big Data and investment management, Citi Business Advisory Services predicted that “with the improved volume, velocity and variety of data inherent in the big data approach, the innovation seen in systematic trading models over the past decade could accelerate.” One of the platformsRead More

More than a year ago, the Capco Institute Journal of Financial Transformation (Journal) ran a “critical assessment,” by Robert Sams, of bitcoin blockchains as a means of distributed clearing. With both bitcoins and blockchains newly in the news, Sams’ informed assessment is worth another look. Two years ago, Nasdaq announcedRead More

In 2009, Martijn Cremers, of the University of Notre Dame, and Antti Petajisto of New York University, introduced a new portfolio measurement they called Active Share, measuring in percentage terms the deviation of a portfolio from its benchmark (deviation in holdings, not in performance). Thus, a portfolio with 100% activeRead More

Are funds of funds a valuable form of intermediation? Robert Harris, of the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business, and three other distinguished scholars looked at this question in a Darden Business School Working Paper, and they decided that, at least with regard specifically to the role of FOFsRead More

A large team of officers and staff affiliated with the Federal Reserve (eight with the Board in DC, five with the FR Bank of New York, one with the FRB of Chicago) have collaborated on a new paper on distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement. Of necessity, givenRead More

Natixis Global Asset Management has released the results of a survey of 500 institutional investors, asking them their views on prospects for 2017. The surveyed institutions expect that political and economic developments could cause an increase in volatility in the year to come, and active managers have to reset theirRead More

A new paper by G. Nathan Dong and two other scholars investigates private equity placements in China and their consequences for the issuing firms. The study works from a natural experiment that resulted from regulations created by the PRC ten years ago. In 2006, the China Securities Regulatory Commission issuedRead More

A recent article by Alexander Rudin and William M. Marr, in The Journal of Alternative Investments, seeks to change the terms of discussion of the risk parity method of portfolio construction in a way that might remove some of the counter-intuitive consequences that can dog the approach. The paper, “InvestorRead More

A new report from State Street Corporation and the Alternative Investment Management Association says that nearly half of the market participants surveyed believe that decreased market liquidity is a secular change, not a cyclical one: that is, that it is a climate that is here to stay, not a rainRead More

Intralinks, a firm created 20 years ago to enable “high-stakes transactions and business collaborations,” has surveyed global dealmakers on the upcoming U.S. presidential election and on how it may affect the economic and regulatory environment for mergers and acquisitions. The gist of it is: in a database of 1,600 M&ARead More

The chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Timothy Massad, addressed the Outlook Conference of the Managed Funds Association on October 21, and spoke about the global implementation of uncleared margin rules, which he called a critical component of “the new regulatory framework for swaps trading that the leaders ofRead More

Mid-October news reports tell us that Navinder Sarao has lost his effort to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States. So he will face charges in the U.S. in connection with the “flash crash” of May 2010, the incident in which the DJIA fell 998.5 points in less thanRead More

In two decisions this year, in July and against in a re-affirmance in October, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has reinstated a claim brought by Trustee of the creditors of the bankrupt  chemical company Lyondell, looking to recover distributions made to the company’s shareholdersRead More

On Oct. 7, a group of hedge funds that hold the general obligation bonds of Puerto Rico amended an existing complaint (initially filed in July) in a significant respect: by adding a new defendant. The new defendant is the issuer of the “COFINA” bonds, the Puerto Rico Sales Tax FinancingRead More

Hedge funds, among them some of those the unsympathetic call “vultures,” bought into the bonds of the Petróleo de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) early this year. PDVSA is Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, the consequence of nationalization forty years ago. Its fate turns on (a) the vagaries of post-Chavez politics in thatRead More

Why do people own great paintings? As something pleasing to hang on the wall? As a way to impress the neighbors? Presumably many buyers of privately circulating 17th century Dutch masterpieces are speculators, alpha seekers. But aren’t they speculating, in the end, upon what some end user will pay? WhatRead More

The long-awaited nickel-tick pilot program, an effort to test an alternative to the penny-or-less tick sizes that now prevail, , officially gets underway on October 3, and is scheduled to continue for two years. Securities have been selected and the phase-in schedule is set. The pilot is of significance, becauseRead More

A former finance minister of the Republic of Greece has published a book, Game Over, on what it is like to be in the midst of a continent-wide political and financial crisis. This is a volume that might be read with attention by those who seek alpha from distressed sovereignRead More

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEx), the company that bought the London Metal Exchange four years ago, has further expansion plans. At a recent event on the commodity markets of East Asia, Charles Li, the CEO of HKEx, spoke on this point. Li wants to create a physical metals tradingRead More

There has been a flurry in recent days of activity about blockchains among the graybeards of the financial world, those who ponder the Really Big Picture and who have the ear of important regulators. Let us start from the beginning. What is a blockchain? It is a chronological, virtual, andRead More

Two scholars associated with the University of California, Berkeley, have argued in a recent paper that there is less to latency arbitrage, or at least to a certain paradigmatic sort of latency arb, than meets the eye. Robert P. Bartlett III and Justin McCrary used data from the Securities InformationRead More

Where does the world stand on the restructuring problem after NML v Argentina?  One professor and one practicing attorney recently coauthored a fascinating proposal that might answer that question, part of which they call the “cryonic solution,” after the hoped-for science of freezing people to await the development of aRead More

In a recent paper submitted to the G20’s working group on international financial architecture, scholars with the Bank for International Settlements have warned that an accumulation of debt in the years since the global financial crisis has left the emerging market economics (EMEs) vulnerable to capital outflows. The authors ofRead More

The name is awkwardly long, and the standard abbreviation, “RAMOM,” sounds like what one says when cheering on one’s mother as she nears a finish line. Still, risk adjusted time series momentum strategies have something to be said for them, in comparison to cross-sectional momentum (MOM without preface), or evenRead More

It is always aesthetically pleasing to see something elegant brought down from an attic, dusted off, and found to be of continuing value as part of the home’s furniture. Back in 1977, Edward Miller offered a hypothesis about the price move patterns distinctive to newly listed stocks.  In “Risk, Uncertainty,Read More

Neuberger Berman, the asset management business spun off from Lehman in late 2008, has produced a new report on foreign access to China’s bond market. China has until now kept its bond market tightly fenced off from the rest of the world, which offers a marked contrast with the behaviorRead More

A new paper by two economists affiliated with the Federal Reserve System presents a new measure of the monetary policy exposure of individual stocks. The simplest approach to this task would be to regress individual stock returns around major central bank moves (“shocks”). But that turns out not to beRead More

The latest report from Eurekahedge indicates that hedge funds’ assets under management are up by $19.9 billion in the first half of 2016 worldwide. Eurekahedge, which tracks the health of the hedge fund industry month by month, also says that total industry performance-based results were down, $5.2 billion, so moreRead More

Last year, two scholars writing in the Journal of Alternative Investments looked at the volatility spillover effects in the Chinese stock index futures and spot markets.  The question for them was whether there is spillover from spot markets into futures markets and back. I propose to give you their answer,Read More

A new paper from EDHEC Infrastructure Institute decides that there is no such thing as a listed infrastructure asset class. What is the practical significance of that inference?  It means that for investors (individual or institutional) looking to diversify their portfolio properly, a dedicated index focused on a listed infrastructureRead More

Given the growing body of scholarly work over “risk factor” investing, especially the growing number of risks cited as factors, one has to wonder: what exactly is a “factor”?  In terms that admirers of Rodgers and Hammerstein will remember: is a feature of an investment a risk factor because it’sRead More

How well did hedge funds help their investors to hedge potential losses as a consequence of the markets’ immediate reaction to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom? How well will they hedge the other uncertainties going forward? Thursday, June 23, the UK voted to leave the European Union. TheRead More

On Friday, June 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the promotion of IEX from an ATS to a proper exchange. Thereby it gave a new ending of sorts to Michael Lewis’ book, Flash Boys. One of the big issues for both proponents and opponents of IEX’ application to becomeRead More

Puerto Rico and various instrumentalities thereof may default on debt within days. If they do so, this will happen without the benefit of an applicable bankruptcy system or other legislated means of restructuring, without a referee if you will, unless Congress acts decisively within a matter of days, something thatRead More

The Bank of England is not only the central bank of the United Kingdom, in continuous operation since 1694; it is the model upon which central banking worldwide has been created. The Mother Central Bank is what it is. Mervyn King, the chief economist of the Bank of England throughRead More

In early December 2015, representatives of 196 parties met in Paris, France, to discuss climate change, and the necessary reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on a global basis.  The result, the “Paris Climate Agreement,” seeks to limit warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, through aRead More