Browsing: Financial Economics Theory

The quantitative analysis of markets, and of the performance of fund managers, is in large part the mathematical treatment of various (often contested) metrics of risk. Let us bring two points about risk into collision. First, over more than three decades scholars have debated the “equity premium puzzle.” Why doRead More

By Victoria Dobrynskaya, PhD, associate professor of Finance at National Research University Higher School of Economics Looking at the whole cryptocurrency market through the prism of standard multi-factor asset-pricing models reveals that there is a significant heterogeneity in the exposure to the downside market risk across coins, and that aRead More

By Hossein Kazemi, The CAIA Association & The Isenberg School of Management In recent weeks, hundreds of research reports and many more blogs and commentaries have discussed the current valuation of the US stock market.  With the economy in a recession and corporate profits and GDP down by double digits,Read More

From the point of view of the alternative investment world, the dramas associated with the year 2020 may not constitute as apocalyptic a challenge or as paradigmatic a shift as is commonly thought. It may even be considered, in many respects, business as usual (aside from an occasional “murder hornet.”)Read More

By Rodney Sullivan, CFA, CAIA, Executive Director, University of Virginia Darden School of Business US recessions are typically accompanied by declines in stock market returns and, of course, 2020 has been no exception. We are once again reminded that investing is not easy leaving many investors to wonder how bestRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association During CAIA Association’s most recent Virtual Chapter event, Keith and I (virtually) sat down with Chris Tidmore, CFA, CPA at The Vanguard Group to discuss Vanguard’s recent whitepaper, “The Wrapper Matters: Comparing Liquid Alternatives to Hedge Funds”Read More

Statistician/philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb critiques “behavioral” economics and finance as he looks at the differences between “binary forecasts” and “real world payoffs,” in a recent paper for the International Journal of Forecasting. Much of the argument will be familiar to those who have some acquaintance with Taleb’s work as itRead More

By Daniel Fang, CFA, CAIA, Quantitative Research, and Diana Olteanu-Veerman, CFA, Quantitative Strategy, Northern Trust Asset Management Composite Equity Issuance (Cei) Can be a Proxy for Intangible Returns Anomalies Even though factor investing is widely supported in academia and investment practice, forecasting and harvesting factor returns remains challenging for various reasons.Read More

In a new paper, three quants with Robeco suggest that the “short” side of the activity of many long/short equity trades is pointless. These quants are David Blitz, Guido Baltussen, who is also affiliated with Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and Pim Van Vliet. They have broken down the common equity factorRead More

Carlos Salas Najera, of the New York City Data Science Academy, has tested an old idea (pairs trading) for a strategy that could be tailored to energy stocks and related ETFs. The resulting paper is “Pairs Trading and VAR Analysis Applied to Energy Stocks.” His latest paper, though, has aRead More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding of the “Markowitz problem” has changed in the 60+ years since Harry Markowitz’ publication of an article in the Journal of Finance that outlined the basics of modern portfolio theory. The problem is that portfolio theory requires an investor to estimate risk, return, and correlation from market data, meaningRead More

A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago looks at the real risk-free interest rate over the last 30 years, where it has been trending, and why that trend hasn’t had the consequences one might intuitively have predicted. The paper, Accounting for Macro-Finance Trends, is the workRead More

In the late 1980s, the chairman of The Foothill Group approached Edward I. Altman, already then well known for the creation of the Z-score used for predicting bankruptcy. The chairman asked Altman to develop a descriptive and analytical white paper on distressed debt. He obliged, writing first a paper onRead More

It will be 50 years ago next year (1969) that Hans R. Stoll came out with “The Relationship between Put and Call Option Prices,” establishing the principle of put-call parity. Stoll’s article in The Journal of Finance was a landmark in the developing scholarship about derivatives. It preceded the workRead More

By Deepak Kanungo, Founder and CEO of Hedged Capital LLC In this introductory article, we explore three types of errors inherent in all financial models. We examine these errors using a simple probabilistic model that can be used for predicting the federal funds rate, an interest rate of seminal importanceRead More

Two recent scholarly papers take distinctive looks at the sukuk market in Malaysia. Accordingly, each contributes to the ongoing discussions and evaluations of the place of Islamic finance within the broader global (and alpha-seeking) picture. Sukuk are bond-like instruments structured to pay profit, not interest, that are sold chiefly toRead More

Glassbridge has put out an ambitious white paper about the “evolution of asset allocation across the investment management industry,” one that begins with the basics of the Capital Asset Pricing Model and ends with quantitative analysis and crowdsourcing. The premise is that new strategies, and new ranges of data, areRead More

The founder of CEO of MSR Indices, a Parsippany, N.J.-based index-investors consultancy, has authored a white paper on target volatility, also known as intertemporal risk parity. The gist of the paper is that: (1) equity hedge funds do secure alpha for their investors, obvious if one measures their performance againstRead More

The “round number effect” is an endless source of fascination in the worlds of both trading and statistics. Human brains, after all, tend to think in round numbers. A market pundit on television may say, “If the price of stock XYZ gets below $8.00, it’ll be worth buying.” He won’tRead More

A new paper by four U.S. scholars makes a contribution to the literature on factors and the modeling of stock prices. The paper, “An Information Factor,” proposes in essence that the momentum factor isn’t what it seems to be. Ever since the publication of a 1993 paper by Jegadeesh andRead More

An author affiliated with the National University of Singapore and one with Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, have co-authored a paper on the structure of the securities lending market: specifically, on the fact that this market is an oligopoly, and on the implications that has for pricing. The general outlines areRead More

Cryptocurrencies are increasingly traded on centralized exchanges, such as Gemini and Coinbase. This fact itself has generated some resentment in the crypto world, because the very idea of  centralized exchange seems to violate the original anarchic animating spirit of the cryptocurrencies, even of “Satoshi” himself. Vitalik Buterin, who as the creatorRead More

Ten years ago, a series of bank failures rocked the financial and economic worlds. One of the immediate political consequences of those failures was the creation, by the US government, of a Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This almost immediately morphed into a troubled equity relief program, because as TreasuryRead More

Three scholars affiliated with Johns Hopkins have evaluated cryptocurrency investing, in a new paper available at SSRN, and have concluded that “near-term cryptocurrency markets are semi-strong form efficient.” That bit of finance theorist jargon means that all publicly available information gets discounted quickly into an asset’s price, so that neitherRead More

On May 30, CAIA France sponsored a panel discussion on absolute return strategies, held at the headquarters of Amundi Asset Management, on the Boulevard Pasteur in Paris. Frederic Hoogveld, the head of investment specialists, index and smart beta for Amundi, spoke that evening on dynamic factor allocation. As a review:Read More

AQR Capital Management, the Greenwich, CT-based global investment firm, has posted a new discussion of the volatility risk premium and of the advantages of strategies based thereon. In principle the premium would disappear if markets efficiently estimated the probability of significant losses. But it remains, because investors are risk averseRead More

A recent paper by Michael Stutzer, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Leeds School of Business, suggests that the intertemporal version of the capital asset pricing model (ICAPM) needs some revision in light of the market dominance of style investors. A more full statement of that might be: itRead More

Alan D. Crane and two colleagues have written a paper on whether and how hedge funds profit from publicly available information, in particular from SEC filings. Crane is an assistant professor at Houston’s Rice University, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. He and two Rice students, Kevin Crotty andRead More

Roberto Obregon, of the Meketa Investment Group, has written a paper (available at SSRN) on the use of options-based equity strategies. Obregon is the author of a number of scholarly papers on alternative strategies, including one last fall on global macro, which he co-authored with Willam Dana. In his optionsRead More

In December last year the NYSE Arca Inc. filed a proposed rule change that would allow for the creation of Exchange Traded Funds investing in Bitcoin futures contracts, and, potentially, in other related Financial Instruments. In January 2018 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission extended its review of this proposal.Read More

A recent paper from Robeco discusses whether a liquidity premium exists in the stock market. The authors, David Blitz, Jean-Paul van Brakel, and Milan Vidojevic, conclude that “the evidence for such a premium is, at best, weak.” Less politely, these authors refer to the whole notion of a liquidity premiumRead More

Vineer Bhansali and Lawrence Harris have written a scholarly paper on what they call the “extraordinary growth of short volatility strategies” since late 2010. A lot of people and institutions seem to have come to the conclusion that spiking volatility is just that. A “spike” on a chart is definitionallyRead More

S&P Dow Jones Indices has put out a paper offering market participants without patience for “academic rigor” an accessible guide to the so-called “Fear Index,” the VIX, calculated from the prices of a specific basket of S&P options. The contributors to the paper are: Tim Edwards, S&P Global senior director,Read More

A new paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Empirical Finance, looks at the corporate bond market, and looks specifically for behavioral biases. Although it finds some, it also finds that they are small, and can’t serve as the foundation for a profitable trading strategy. Though its route is roundabout, theRead More

Jason Williams, senior vice president at Lazard Asset Management, has written a white paper on the “six sins of smart beta.” First: what is smart beta? Academic studies indicate anomalies in the markets that somehow don’t get arbitraged away.  These become identified as “factors” and indexes can be designed soRead More

A new report from Aon discusses the contemporary market for alternative risk premia: where it is, how it got here; where it may be headed. The authors, Matthew Towsey and Chris Walvoord, begin with some very basic considerations of what ‘risk premia’ are. They are, on the one hand, theRead More

Nemit Shroff, an associate professor of accounting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, has written a study of the consequences of auditing for the auditees. He has concluded that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) “adds significant value to the financial reporting process,” with aRead More

Bruce Jacobs and Kenneth Levy, the founders and Chief Investment Officers of Jacobs Levy Equity Management, have brought out a new and considerably thickened edition of their classic collection of articles on equity investment. This second edition of Equity Management contains all 15 articles from the original, and 24 ofRead More

Two scholars affiliated with FERI Trust, a leading investment manager of the German-speaking countries of Europe, have written a study of hedge fund strategies that uses a “network-based analysis” thereof. The two authors, Eduard Baitinger and Thomas Maier, argue that hedge fund strategies show “numerous network-based properties” which help explainRead 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