The Market Timing Power of Moving Averages: Evidence from US REITs and REIT Indexes

I present evidence that a moving average (MA) trading strategy dominates buying and holding the underlying asset in a mean‐variance sense using monthly returns of value‐weighted and equal‐weighted US REIT indexes over the period January 1980 until December 2010. The abnormal returns are largely insensitive to the four Carhart factors and produce economically and statistically significant alphas of between 10 and 15% per year after transaction costs. This performance is robust to different lags of the MA and in subperiods while investor sentiment, liquidity risks, business cycles, up and down markets, and the default spread cannot fully account for its performance. The MA strategy works just as well with randomly generated returns and bootstrapped returns. The substantial market timing ability of the MA strategy appears to be the main driver of the abnormal returns. The returns to the MA strategy resemble the returns of an imperfect at‐the‐money protective put strategy relative to the underlying portfolio. The lagged signal to switch has substantial predictive power over the subsequent return of the REIT index. The MA strategy avoids the sharp downturn at the beginning of 2008 and substantially outperforms the cumulative returns of the buy‐and‐hold strategy using all of the 20 REIT indexes. The results from applying the MA strategy with 274 individual REITs largely corroborate the findings for the REIT indexes.     

Market Timing With Moving Averages

I present evidence that a moving average (MA) trading strategy has a greater average return and skewness as well as a lower variance compared to buying and holding the underlying asset using monthly returns of value‐weighted US decile portfolios sorted by market size, book‐to‐market, and momentum, and seven international markets as well as 18,000 individual US stocks. The MA strategy generates risk‐adjusted returns of 3–7% per year after transaction costs. The performance of the MA strategy is driven largely by the volatility of stock returns and resembles the payoffs of an at‐the‐money protective put on the underlying buy‐and‐hold return. Conditional factor models with macroeconomic variables, especially the default premium, can explain some of the abnormal returns. Standard market timing tests reveal ample evidence regarding the timing ability of the MA strategy.     

Price and Earnings Momentum,Transaction Costs,and an Innovative Practitioner Technique

We use an innovative practitioner technique to investigate the interplay between the ex post performance of momentum strategies and transaction costs, rebalancing frequency, turnover constraints, and fund size. We have three interrelated main results: first, the level of and correlation between active returns to price momentum and earnings momentum strategies vary dramatically with these factors; second, strategies that are fearful of ex ante transaction costs generate returns net of transaction costs that are far superior to the net returns of naive strategies; and third, obtaining better traction with the unique elements of each strategy yields a more profitable combined strategy.     

Call Auction Transparency and Market Liquidity: Evidence from China

This paper uses the natural experiment offered by the Shanghai Stock Exchange to investigate the impact of opening call auction transparency on market liquidity. We find that the dissemination of indicative trade information during the pre‐open call auction session leads to an overall improvement in stock liquidity in the continuous trading session. Bid‐ask spreads narrow in the first trading hour because adverse selection risk fell significantly and there is less price volatility in the continuous market. This effect is greater for actively traded securities than illiquid securities. Our findings are robust for different lengths of sample period, different lengths of trading hours after market open, and stocks that had (and had not) reformed the share split structure during our research period.     

The Canadian Hedge Fund Industry: Performance and Market Timing

We analyze the risk and return characteristics of Canadian hedge funds based on a comprehensive database we compiled. We find that Canadian hedge funds have higher risk‐adjusted performance and different distributional characteristics relative to the global hedge fund indices. We investigate market timing by Canadian hedge funds and find that they do not time the Canadian or global stock and bond markets, but hedge funds in the Managed Futures strategy group time the commodity market. These results are robust to parameter instability and structural changes in the model. We also illustrate the impact of using local and global risk factors to analyze the performance of local investment firms.     

Non‐Tradable Share Reform,Liquidity, and Stock Returns in China

This article studies the influence of the non‐tradable share reform in the cross‐section of stock returns in China. Prior research has generally neglected this important development in the Chinese stock market. We find that the firm‐specific illiquidity measures that reflect direct transaction costs, price impact and difficulties in trading immediacy, exhibit a positive and significant relationship with stock returns. These effects are particularly pronounced after the non‐tradable share reform. Furthermore, in the post‐reform era, portfolios with high illiquidity (i.e. high relative bid–ask spread, high Amihud illiquidity, low Amivest liquidity ratio) significantly outperform portfolios with low illiquidity, controlling for size, and book‐to‐market effects.     

Investor Sentiment and Stock Market Volatility: Evidence from India

In this article, the authors probe the role of irrational investor sentiment in the determination of Indian stock market volatility. The authors developed a new irrational aggregate sentiment index (IASI) to examine the issue. The conditional volatility is extracted from the nonlinear univariate models for the market indices and the IASI. The vector autoregression (VAR) is carried out to analyze the relationship between the volatility of irrational aggregate sentiment index and stock market volatility. The authors find a unidirectional causality from sentiment to stock market volatility, and their findings highlight the significance of sentiment in explaining the stock market volatility in India.     

Foreign Ownership Restriction and Momentum – Evidence from Emerging Markets

This study investigates the impact of foreign investors on stock price efficiency and return predictability in emerging markets. It finds that stocks fully investible for foreign investors exhibit stronger price momentum than non‐investible stocks. The difference in momentum effects between stocks with different levels of investibility cannot be fully explained by world market risk, size, turnover, or country‐specific factors. Further tests show that fully investible stocks have no post‐earnings‐announcement drift (PEAD), and their short‐term momentum reverses over a longer horizon. These results show that the stronger momentum of highly investible stocks does not appear to be driven by foreign investors' underreaction to firm‐specific information, but is more likely to be generated by their positive feedback trading.     

投资者情绪短期对股票市场的影响研究

随着互联网的发展,上市公司在社会化媒体平台发布信息,投资者评论这些信息并制定投资策略。现阶段,多数投资者是非理性的,他们缺乏获取真实信息的渠道,也不具备专业的投资理论知识,易受网络舆情的影响而产生"羊群效应"。通过利用中文文本分析技术对东方财富网股吧的评论进行分析,并构建投资者情绪指数,分析投资者情绪在短期对股票市场的影响。实证结果表明投资者情绪在短期的确会影响到股票的收益,该结论能帮助投资者有效利用互联网信息,制定投资决策。     

Time-Series Momentum Trading Strategies in the Global Stock Market

In recent years, the presence of abnormal profits in stock markets has been empirically validated, thereby putting the Efficient Market Hypothesis on trial; and the assertion that the market knows everything or the market cannot be beaten has been proven to be a myth. With the presence of profitable trading rules in stock markets, speculation becomes a common phenomenon making the financial system intrinsically instable, vulnerable to shocks, and prone to crashes. This study, while exploring the presence of profitable trading rules in the global market in recent years, finds that developed countries’ submarkets are more vulnerable to speculating activities     

Managerial Sharing,Mutual Fund Connections,and Performance

In this study, we examine the effect of mutual fund connections, through managerial sharing, on performance and stock holding commonalities. Our analysis of return correlations and portfolio holdings indicates that more interconnected funds tend to buy and sell similar stocks, hence increasing the similarity of portfolio holdings and undermining the distinctiveness of their investment strategy. Our results also indicate that highly connected funds significantly underperform weakly connected funds by about 1.4% on a yearly risk‐adjusted basis. We show that fund family performance is unaffected by the intensity of fund connections, and that greater fund connections could significantly enhance family‐level profit margins.     

How Reliable Are the Findings of ‘Foreign’ Investor Studies That Use TIC Data? A Look from the Host Market

Empirical literature on foreign investors' trading in stock markets heavily relies on US Treasury International Capital (TIC) data. Biases in TIC data and the fact that it represents only one source country raise questions on how reliable the conclusions based on TIC data are. Employing novel data of complete foreign flows compiled at destination, we answer these questions. Although the correlations between net flows derived from TIC and destination‐compiled data are low, and visible differences exist in some individual country results, TIC findings are not far off in central tendency. Notably, however, net foreign flows' persistence, positive response to world returns and positive contemporaneous correlation with local returns are more significant than TIC data suggest. Measurement noise in TIC data appears to result in underestimation of these key features.     

Dividend‐Rollover Effect and the Ad Hoc Black‐Scholes Model

One of the most widely used option‐valuation models among practitioners is the ad hoc Black‐Scholes (AHBS) model. The main contribution of this study is methodological. We carefully consider three dividend strategies (No dividend, Implied‐forward dividend, and Actual dividend) for the AHBS model to investigate their effect on pricing errors. We suggest a new dividend strategy, implied‐forward dividend, which incorporates expectational information on dividends embedded in option prices. We demonstrate that our implied‐forward dividend strategy produces more consistent estimates between in‐sample market and model option prices. More importantly our new implied‐forward dividend strategy makes more accurate out‐of‐sample forecasts for one‐day or one‐week ahead prices. Second, we document that both a “Return‐volatility” Smile and a “Return‐pricing Error” Smile exist. From these return characteristics, we make two conclusions: (1) the return dependency of implied volatility is an important explanatory variable and should be controlled to reduce the pricing error of an AHBS model, and (2) it is important for the hedging horizon to be based on return size, that is, the larger the contemporaneous return, the more frequent an option issuer must rebalance the option's hedge. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 32:742‐772, 2012     

Assessing the effectiveness of the Paulson “teaser freezer” Plan: Evidence from the ABX index

How did investors holding assets backed by subprime residential mortgages react when Treasury Secretary Paulson announced the so-called “teaser freezer” plan to modify mortgages in December 2007? We apply event-study methodology to the ABX index, the only source of daily securities prices in subprime mortgage markets. Our results show that investors initially perceived that the Paulson Plan would improve conditions in subprime housing markets. Specifically, those investors who held the riskiest securities backed by subprime residential housing benefited the most from the Paulson Plan. These findings do not extend to the longer term, suggesting that any positive effects from Paulson Plan were overwhelmed by the continued deterioration in housing markets.     

Heterogeneous firm-level responses to trade liberalization: A test using stock price reactions

This paper presents novel empirical evidence on key predictions of heterogeneous firm models by examining stock market reactions to the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 (CUSFTA). I derive testable predictions for a class of models based on Melitz (2003). Using the uncertainty surrounding CUSFTA's ratification, I show that the pattern of abnormal returns of Canadian manufacturing firms was strongly consistent with predictions related to export (U.S.) tariff reductions, but less so with predictions related to import (Canadian) tariff reductions. Lower Canadian tariffs did have an effect through the implied reduction in intermediate input tariffs, however.     

The price effects of index additions: A new explanation

We further explore a new volatility explanation for the permanent price effect of index additions, using a sample of changes in the Nikkei 225. Additions to the index elicit significant price hikes, which tend to be permanent despite temporary price reversals. Meanwhile, investor awareness and demand increase, while price volatility decreases for the added stocks, contrary to the higher price volatility for stocks added to the S&P 500. Moreover, multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that the lower volatility contributes significantly to the permanent price boost, a new explanation; so does the higher investor awareness, consistent with the prior literature.     

Other people's money: A comparison of institutional investors

Using unique equity ownership data, we investigate the stock picking preferences and return forecasting performances of institutional investors that manage their own money against those that manage others’. We reveal that these investors’ preferences significantly differ in historical patterns, liquidity and prudence when picking stocks. In particular, ‘own money managers’ display a risk-seeking behaviour whereas “others’ money managers” exhibit risk-averse characteristics. However, our results indicate that both types of investors are well informed, albeit own money managers excel in the short-term while others’ money managers are successful in the long-term.     

Investor Sentiment and Return Predictability in Agricultural Futures Markets

This study examines the usefulness of trader‐position‐based sentiment index for forecasting future prices in six major agricultural futures markets. It has been found that large speculator sentiment forecasts price continuations. In contrast, large hedger sentiment predicts price reversals. Small trader sentiment hardly forecasts future market movements. An investigation was performed into various sentiment‐based timing strategies, and it was found that the combination of extreme large trader sentiments provides the strongest timing signal. These results are generally consistent with the hedging‐pressure theory, suggesting that hedgers pay risk premiums to transfer nonmarketable risks in futures markets. Moreover, it does not appear that large speculators in the futures markets possess any superior forecasting ability. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:929–952, 2001     

Ethics and Disclosure: A Study of the Financial Performance of Firms in the Seasoned Equity Offerings Market

In this article, we examine the association between ethics and disclosure and the impact of this association on the long-term, post-issue performance of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). We argue that firms with extensive disclosure are less likely to face information problems, and more likely to lead to an active shareholder monitoring, and therefore, engage in fewer unethical activities, such as aggressive earnings manipulation, and have better long-term, post-issue performance. Consistent with these predictions, this study presents evidence that disclosure is negatively related to unethical earnings manipulation and positively associated with long-term, post-issue performance. In particular, we find that long-term, post-issue SEO underperformance is significantly less for firms with extensive disclosure and conservative earnings management than firms with less disclosure and aggressive earnings management. We interpret this evidence to mean that over the long run, the capital market values ethical financial reporting and corporate efforts to incorporate social responsibility into their decision-making processes, for example, by enhancing information transparency through voluntary disclosure.