Browsing: Finance & Economics

Amundi-CREATE Research has offered its independent assessment on challenges now faced by the world’s pension funds, given the policies of central banks. The subject is of great significance to alternative investments managers who represent the aggressive end of many a pension fund’s portfolio. The gist of the report is thatRead More

Telegram Open Network (TON) is a blockchain project supported by a native utility token called the Gram, created by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, who were behind the Telegram messaging app. TON now faces an existential regulatory threat. The Durovs created TON in response to what they saw as the limitsRead More

The phrase “books and records” hardly suggests excitement. Yet, the cliched corporate lawyers’ phrase is not without payoff, either. Activist hedge funds are always interested in ammunition that will help them shake up entrenched managements and unlock value. The question often arises during the resultant fights: when does an activist/dissidentRead More

Machine learning as a way of managing a portfolio is a “wave of the future” with a lot of sea to cover before it breaks on the shore. Meson Capital Partners has sent its investors an update and summary for 2019 Q3 regarding its managed market neutral fund, and thisRead More

The term “greater fool theory” refers to the many circumstances in which speculators buy a (potentially) productive asset, basing their buy decision not on the asset’s operational value, but on the notion that there is a “greater fool” out there who will pay even more. The term refers, then, toRead More

A recent publication from Fidelity Institutional Asset Management, while looking at the money markets in the US, emphasizes that investors are looking for liquidity. The report, written by Kerry Pope and Chris Lewis, each an institutional portfolio manager with FIAM, begins with a discussion of the Federal Reserve’s September rateRead More

In  a new report, Pitchbook looks at the mergers and acquisitions trends in Europe. In 2019 through September, the value of European M&A is lower than it has been since 2014, and the volume is lower than it has been since 2010. Only two sectors did not see year-on-year declinesRead More

Recent developments in cryptocurrency have brought new currencies and more uncertainty about them and some of the underlying investments in this brave new world. Anthony Pompliano, a founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital, tackles these issues and more relating to the cryptocurrency universe in his blog, Off the Chain.Read More

Larry Tabb, in a piece in the Financial Times, has defended the controversial practice of payment for order flow (PFOF). Let’s start with PFOF and why it’s controversial. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority defined PFOF in a recent white paper as the practice in which an investment firm, typically aRead More

Since, as everyone says, “past performance is no guarantee of future results,” a history of close correlation between two assets, or between a single asset and a benchmark, is no guarantee of future correlation. The threat that a correlation upon which a particular investor has relied will cease to applyRead More

Bitcoin derivatives act a lot like the derivatives of other asset classes. Two scholars at the University of London recently looked at bitcoin’s “volatility smiles and skews” as found in the short and long dated maturity of options traded at the Deribit Exchange in 2019. Helyette Geman and Henry Price,Read More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association The saying “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” has its origins all the way back to the 1600’s when most of the carbon now in our atmosphere was “safely” encased in limestone and other rock formations within theRead More

Last month saw an extraordinary spike in the interest rates of the repo market—the market that consists of the (very) short-term, usually the overnight, borrowing of government securities. Hedge funds, along with other institutions such as trading firms and banks, regularly hand over US Treasury bills and the like inRead More

The “volatility effect,” also known as the “low-risk effect,” is the subject of a new paper from Robeco. The gist of the “effect” is this: low-risk stocks “should” show a lesser return than high-risk stocks. The Capital Asset Pricing Model predicts a linear relationship between the risk of a securityRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association How do you turn a millennial into a capitalist? Sell her SNAP in the post-IPO market. A little hindsight here shows how ridiculous this all looked. The initial sellers of the shares were the founders and their VCs (just under 30% of the offering),Read More

One regular theme of coverage and analysis that involves the listed equities, including analysis of the pursuit of alpha, is that many of the users of these markets claim, often quite obstreperously, that the exchanges charge more than makes sense and some restructuring of the industry is in order. TheRead More

A report from CREATE in collaboration with BNY Mellon looks at two related megatrends in investing—climate change and artificial intelligence. It asks in each case: how is this trend perceived in terms of opportunities and risks? What are the specific investment issues involved or solutions likely to be adopted? AndRead More

Initial Exchange Offerings, that is, offerings administered by a crypto exchange, on behalf of a startup—where the startup is trying to raise funds with newly issued tokens—has developed as an alternative to an older model, the Initial Coin Offering, where participants make their contributions to a smart contract. Hirander MisraRead More

David Stevenson, a US District Court Judge for the Northern District of Texas, has presented his analysis of the  differences between the law in the United Kingdom and the United States concerning “a debtor’s ability to approve a restructuring arrangement over the objection of creditors that disapprove.” This is moreRead More

A new paper looks at how hedge funds adjust their information acquisition and trading behavior as analyst coverage changes—and more specifically, when certain stocks cease to be covered by certain analysts. These authors considered the hypothesis that, faced with a murkier environment, hedge funds might become more cautious, reducing theirRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION When pitching an investment product with a backtested history the frequent response from potential investors is that they have never seen a bad backtest. Naturally this is true as there is no point in marketing a strategy with a poor backtest as investorsRead More

Neuberger Berman has long pressed the investment thesis that the prolonged recovery from the depths of the Global Financial Crisis would end, when it ended, with a “soft landing.” There will be a slowing of growth, and with that an increase in volatility, but it need not involve a “hard”Read More

A new paper takes an experimental look at “Active Risk Budgeting,” a method of portfolio construction that looks to build upon older and sometimes passive risk budgeting approaches, adding enough active management to allow the risk budget to change over time. For example, an institution might want its risk budgetRead More

A recent publication by two executives of State Street Associates identifies a new factor in currency turns, which it calls the “equity differential.” In effect, it argues for the viability of a trading strategy based on this factor. The paper argues that the differential in trailing equity market performance stronglyRead More

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued three no-action letters on the issue of research payments, in light of developments on that issue in Europe in 2017. Specifically, they dealt with the cross-border of Europe’s rules (MiFID II), which were scheduled to take effect, and which did take effect, on Jan.Read More

A lot of hopes have been placed on changes in market tick sizes. In the 1990s there was a big push to reduce the tick sizes of securities, allowing them to get down to one cent or fractions thereof. In the new millennium came a sense of regret. Observers suspectedRead More

There are reports that Google is preparing an announcement of “quantum supremacy” for later this year. If true, this is the biggest tech story since the transistor replaced vacuum tubes. It could be a disruptive development for just about every business with an IT department. Among much else, quantum supremacyRead More

On Feb. 1, ICE Futures US Inc., informed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it was instituting a new “speed bump,” formally called the Passive Order Protection (or POP) Functionality for its gold daily and silver daily futures markets. The idea of POP is to limit the advantage that canRead More

By Mark Shore As the discussions of trade wars and tariffs persisted throughout 2018 and into 2019, it may have influenced a sense of uncertainty in the global financial and commodity markets as companies might have to rethink their supply chains and manage potential disruptions and at least in theRead More

The outperformance of the size, value, and reversal factors is strong, but the momentum factor, which has performed well in the U.S., does not work in China. This is the conclusion of a new white paper published by  Neuberger Berman about quantitative investing in China A shares. It has aRead More

Renewable energy, however defined, is widely seen as a sustainable and socially responsible (and, if the investing is done right, very profitable) addition to one’s portfolio. Indeed, such entities as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio based research-and-analysis shop, exist to show that renewables are theRead More

Three scholars associated with the University of Wollogong, Australia, recently published a paper on the contribution of high-frequency traders to the absorption of new information by the markets, especially in relation to the prices of interest rate derivatives. The study is the work of Alex Frino, Michael Garcia, and IvyRead More

Tatja Karkkainen, a scholar on financial technology who is pursuing a PhD at the University of Glasgow, has written an illuminating paper on price discovery in the bitcoin markets. She begins with the observation that CBOE and CME introduced bitcoin futures in December 2017, “as the first institutional standard cryptocurrencyRead More

Three scholars affiliated with JP Morgan Chase have written a paper on hedge fund behavior ahead of meetings of the Swiss National Bank, with the idea of shedding light on the consequences of the timing of central bank announcements more generally. They conclude that the SNB contributed to the volatilityRead More

The illiquidity premium is one of the most frequently discussed and hotly disputed subjects in financial economics. Speaking broadly, an investment is not a checking account. One generally cannot just “get the cash back” at a moment’s notice, by visiting some equivalent of an ATM. How long will it takeRead More

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently imposed a stay on part of its transaction fee pilot (TFP). There is understandably a good deal of debate about the significance of this stay. The TFP, initiated in December 2018 with the expectation that it would run for at least one year, andRead More

Many high-frequency trading (HFT) firms have disappeared into larger firms as merger activity has increased recently. Those acquired include Chopper, Infinium, Teza, RGM Advisors, and Sun Trading. It also includes Getco, the Chicago-based firm founded in 1999 by two former floor traders that almost defined the field for some time.Read More

By Diane Harrison Hedge fund investors and marketers seem glad to let go of 2018 and its disappointing finish, down 3.41%, a marked decline from 2017’s 11.99% gain. And yet, 2019 markets started the year with an upswing, reflecting the hope that springs eternal in capital raising. Alternatives managers willRead More

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch INTRODUCTION Investors fear black swan events, although it can be argued that this fear is irrational. The black swan theory is a metaphor that describes a surprise event that has a major impact and is often rationalized with hindsight. A recent example would be theRead More

Two scholars working with Bayesian probability theory recently published a fascinating discussion of market timing and portfolio efficiency. They have proposed what they call a “hierarchical ensemble learning portfolio.” Yes, that sounds rather heavy on the jargon. We’ll break it down a bit in what follows. The authors of theRead More

Algorithmic trading may fairly be said to have conquered the public equities world, although there are still pockets of resistance and related controversies. The robots have now turned their attention to the bond markets. Bond markets are different from stock markets in a lot of ways, and many of theseRead More

One startling fact about the new book, How Global Currencies Work: Past Present and Future, is to be found in the index. One would normally expect, from a title and subtitle like that, that there would be a lot of pages enumerated at the index heading “Bretton Woods.” After all,Read More

The NYSE, on Thursday, Feb. 14, Nasdaq, and Cboe Global Markets (the following day) have united to bring lawsuits against the Securities and Exchange Commission to stop its transaction fee pilot. These are the three largest US equity exchanges and their attitude toward their regulator is usually one of cooperation.Read More

A new paper from State Street Global Advisors takes a sociological approach to the search for alpha in emerging market nations. It contends that the “major theme for growth” in the emerging markets moving forward will be “based on the rise of the middle class and rising consumption in theseRead More

Given a long wave of scandals that lasted from 2008 until 2012, most of the derivatives industry, and most of its regulators, have agreed that the London Interbank Offered rate [Libor] ought to be replaced by a more tamper-resistant mechanism. Surely there must be an index that will measure theRead More

A sound “portfolio optimization strategy” is one that takes into consideration how its assets are behaving in the bad times, those that represent the left-side tail of the bell curve. This is not all that novel an idea, but Maria Kartsakli and Felix Schlumpf, Zurich Insurance Company executives, give itRead More

The bosses of a publicly listed company had better care what their employees think about their company, because “Mr. Market” cares. That is one natural inference from a new paper by Jinfei Sheng, of the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, who looks at how the opinionsRead More

Public pension funds in the United States invest in infrastructure. Unfortunately, they aren’t very good at it. A recent working paper of the NBER concludes, indeed, that public pensions are so bad at such investments that they—and thus either the public or its retirees or both—are unwittingly subsidizing infrastructure projects.Read More

A new book by Hassan Malik may serve as a caution for alternative investors operating in the emerging markets, in the form of a case study about the politics of default. Malik is an emerging markets strategist at Ned Davis Research in London. His new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks, beganRead More

On Jan. 11,  the CFA Society India hosted the 9th Annual India Investment Conference in Mumbai. CAIA was a platinum sponsor of this event.  The theme of this year’s IIC was “investing insights for uncertain times.” Nick Pollard, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at CFA Institute, kicked things off with aRead More