Portfolio selection, diversification and fund-of-funds: a note

The present paper examines the performance and diversification properties of active Australian equity fund‐of‐funds (FoF). Simulation analysis is employed to examine portfolio performance as a function of the number of funds in the portfolio. The present paper finds that as the number of funds in an FoF portfolio increases, performance improves in a mean–variance setting; however, measures of skewness and kurtosis behave less favourably given an investor's preferences for the higher moments of the return distribution. The majority of diversification benefits are realized when a portfolio of approximately 6 active equity funds are included in the FoF portfolio.     

Worst case portfolio vectors and diversification effects

We consider the problem of identifying the worst case dependence structure of a portfolio X ₁,…,X _n of d-dimensional risks, which yields the largest risk of the joint portfolio. Based on a recent characterization result of law invariant convex risk measures, the worst case portfolio structure is identified as a μ-comonotone risk vector for some worst case scenario measure μ. It turns out that typically there will be a diversification effect even in worst case situations. The only exceptions arise when risks are measured by translated max correlation risk measures. We determine the worst case portfolio structure and the worst case diversification effect in several classes of examples as, e.g. in elliptical, Euclidean spherical, and Archimedean type distribution classes.     

Portfolio diversification benefits within Europe: Implications for a US investor

This paper investigates the possibility of cointegration between the United States and 11 European equity markets before and after the convergence period of 1995. The results indicate that during the preconvergence and postconvergence periods, some country groups, with and without the US equity market, exhibited cointegration while others did not. For the European Union markets, however, at least one cointegrating vector emerged in either period, but no cointegration among them surfaced during the Euro introduction period of 1999. These results suggest that a US investor can still benefit from country diversification within the European Union markets.     

The diversification effects of volatility-related assets

We examine whether investors can improve their investment opportunity sets through the addition of volatility-related assets into various groupings of benchmark portfolios. By first analyzing the weekly returns of three VIX-related assets over the period 1996-2008 and then applying mean-variance spanning tests, we find that adding VIX-related assets does lead to a statistically significant enlargement of the investment opportunity set for investors. Our empirical findings are robust and have two implications. First, there is scope for the further development of financial products relating to volatility indexes. Second, hedge fund managers can utilize VIX futures contracts or VIX-squared portfolios to enhance their equity portfolio performance, as measured by the Sharpe ratio.     

Efficiency and the trading system: The case of SETSmm

This paper studies the impact that a change from a dealer system to a market-maker supported auction system has on market quality. We study the impact that the introduction of SETSmm at the London Stock Exchange had on firm value, price efficiency and liquidity. We discover a small SETSmm return premium associated with the announcement that securities are to migrate to the new trading system. Moreover, securities that migrate to SETSmm are characterized by improvements to liquidity and pricing efficiency. We find that these changes are related to the return premium.     

Stealth trading: The case of the Tokyo Stock Exchange

The stealth trading hypothesis asserts that informed traders trade strategically by breaking up their orders so as to more easily hide among the liquidity traders. Using data for the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), a pure order-driven market, we find evidence that price changes are driven by small- and medium-size trades, with small trades making the greatest contribution to price change relative to their contribution to trading volume. We also find that large trades explain a greater portion of the cumulative price change on high volatility days. Hence, our results support the stealth trading hypothesis for the TSE.     

Corporate diversification and asymmetric information: evidence from stock market trading characteristics

We examine the relation between firm diversification and asymmetric information empirically using metrics drawn from the market microstructure literature. We find that the average diversified firm in our sample has somewhat less severe asymmetric information problems than a similarly constructed portfolio of stand-alone firms chosen to approximate the segments of the conglomerate. We also find that the information asymmetry of diversified firms is very similar to that of individual focused firms that approximate the conglomerates along several dimensions not including industry composition. We conclude that greater diversification is not on average associated with increased asymmetric information.     

The effects of insider trading on liquidity

This study examines the impacts of directors' dealings on firm liquidity. Consistent with the information asymmetry hypothesis, spread widens and depth falls on insider trading days as compared to non-insider trading days. This result suggests that increased share trading by insiders impairs liquidity. In addition, the spread (depth) measures are positively (negatively) related to how heavily the shares are transacted by informed traders; that is, the greater the number of shares traded by the directors, the wider (narrower) the spread (depth).     

Portfolio choice and mortality-contingent claims: The general HARA case

We solve a portfolio choice problem that includes mortality-contingent claims and labor income under general HARA preferences. Our contribution beyond existing literature is to (i) focus on the covariance between shocks to human capital and financial capital, to (ii) model the utility of a family with basic needs and (iii) include life insurance and pension annuity claims in one unified life-cycle model. Our solution employs a “similarity reduction” mapping which reduces the two-dimensional HJB equation into one dimension. This allows for the implementation of a quick numerical scheme. And, when shocks to human capital and financial capital are perfectly correlated, a closed-form expression is obtained as a special case.     

Portfolio pumping: An examination of investment manager quarter-end trading and impact on performance

Utilizing a database of daily institutional fund manager trades, we examine the contribution of strategic trading at quarter-end associated with potential ‘portfolio pumping’ or ‘ramping up’ of reported stock prices around quarter-ends. We provide the first direct evidence that active fund managers tend to purchase illiquid stocks on the last day of the quarter, in stocks in which they already hold overweight portfolio positions. Consistent with the way fund managers are evaluated, we found that the poor-performing managers display greater evidence of portfolio pumping. Both increased regulatory scrutiny and improvements to market microstructure design reduce the severity of stock price changes at quarter-ends.     

Flying under the radar: The real effects of anonymous trading

Using unique data on TSX Attributed Trading and a new proxy of Tobin's Q that accounts for intangible capital (Peters and Taylor, 2017), we investigate the impact of anonymous trading (AT) on managers' ability to use feedback conveyed by stock prices to improve investment efficiency. We show that AT reduces investment efficiency and that both anonymous buyer-initiated and seller-initiated trades have comparable effects. The negative effect of AT on managerial learning from stock prices is significant only for tangible investments and when disagreement among anonymous traders is high. Taken together, our new evidence indicates that AT distorts investment sensitivity to Tobin's Q, plausibly because anonymity attracts additional (uninformed) liquidity trading, which negatively impacts the effectiveness of asset prices in aggregating private information and in revealing fundamentals.     

The effects of trading activity on market volatility

The paper re-examines the question of excessive implied persistence of volatility estimates when GARCH type models are used. Ten actively traded US stocks are considered and as already established in the literature, when volume traded is inserted in the GARCH (1, 1) or (EGARCH 1, 1) models for returns, the estimated persistence is decreased. Since volume is affected also by within-the-day price movements and hence is not weakly exogenous relative to returns, alternative proxies for trading activities are suggested. It is concluded that the difference between the opening price and the closing price of the previous day accounts also for most of the persistence in the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity.     

The dark side of diversification: The case of US financial holding companies

Potential diversification benefits are one reason why US financial holding companies are offering a growing range of financial services. This paper examines whether the observed shift toward activities that generate fees, trading revenue, and other non-interest income has improved the performance of US financial holding companies (FHCs) from 1997 to 2002. We find evidence that diversification benefits exist between FHCs, but these gains are offset by the increased exposure to non-interest activities, which are much more volatile but not necessarily more profitable than interest-generating activities. Within FHCs, however, marginal increases in revenue diversification are not associated with better performance, while marginal increases in non-interest income are still associated with lower risk-adjusted profits. The key finding that diversification gains are more than offset by the costs of increased exposure to volatile activities represents the dark side of the search for diversification benefits and has implications for supervisors, managers, investors, and borrowers.     

The effects of overnight events on daytime trading sessions

This study investigates the association between overnight and daytime-trading session returns in U.S. equity markets over the last 14 years and interprets it using the overreaction hypothesis. To identify the effects of overnight overreactions on daytime trading sessions, we control for daily investor sentiment, firms' fundamental variables, and risk factors. Our results suggest that investors tend to overreact overnight and react more dispassionately during daytime trading sessions. Investors' reactions differ across sectors, and the degree of overreaction is greater in cyclical industries than in defensive industries. Additionally, we analyze the impacts of overnight reactions on daytime trading sessions focusing on recession periods. The impacts differ by subperiods and are pronounced during the Global Financial Crisis and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Investors' reactions to overnight news events also respond differently to demand and supply shock-induced recessions.     

A derivatives trading recommendation system: The mid‐curve calendar spread case

Derivative traders are usually required to scan through hundreds, even thousands of possible trades on a daily basis. Up to now, not a single solution is available to aid in their job. Hence, this work is aimed to develop a trading recommendation system, and to apply this system to the so‐called Mid‐Curve Calendar Spread (MCCS) trade. To suggest that such approach is feasible, we used a list of 35 different types of MCCSs; a total of 11 predictive and 4 benchmark models. Our results suggest that linear regression with l1‐regularisation (Lasso) compared favourably to other approaches from a predictive and interpretability point of views.     

The effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance: Evidence from Chinese banks

This paper investigates the effects of focus versus diversification on bank performance using data on Chinese banks during the 1996–2006 period. We construct a new measure, economies of diversification, and compare the results to those of the more conventional focus indices, which are based on the sum of squares of shares in different products or regions. Diversification is captured in four dimensions: loans, deposits, assets, and geography. We find that all four dimensions of diversification are associated with reduced profits and higher costs. These results are robust regardless of alternative measures of diversification and performance. Furthermore, we observe that banks with foreign ownership (both majority and minority ownership) and banks with conglomerate affiliation are associated with fewer diseconomies of diversification, suggesting that foreign ownership and conglomerate affiliation may play important mitigating roles. This analysis may provide important implications for bank managers and regulators in China as well as in other emerging economies.     

Stock returns,trading volume,and volatility: The case of African stock markets

The presence of the African Stock Markets (ASMs) in the global frontier markets indices confirms their global portfolio diversification role. This study investigates the asymmetric and intertemporal causality among the stock returns, trading volume, and volatility of eight ASMs. Results based on the linear model reveal that return generally Granger cause trading volume. However, evidence from the quantile regression shows that lagged trading volume has a negative causal effect on returns at low quantiles and positive causal effects at high quantiles. This evidence is consistent with volume-return equilibrium models, disposition and overconfidence models, and information asymmetry models. The positive causal effects of volatility on volume support the dispersion of beliefs model. In contrast, intertemporal evidence of contemporaneous and lagged causal relationships from trading volume to volatility supports the mixture of distribution hypothesis, sequential information acquisition hypothesis, and dynamic efficient market hypothesis. Volume-return and return-volume causality dynamics are quantile-specific and therefore driven by market conditions. However, the volume-volatility causality is dependent on volatility regimes. The linear model results confirm how model misspecification can distort and even reverse empirical evidence relative to nonlinear models.     

The market quality effects of sub-second frequent batch auctions: Evidence from dark trading restrictions

Recent European regulatory restrictions on dark trading induced an increase in sub-second frequent batch/periodic auctions (PA). We exploit this development to investigate the effects of PA on market quality. The restrictions are linked to an observable increase in PA and an economically meaningful loss of liquidity. PA is also associated with a significant decline in liquidity and informational efficiency. However, consistent with Budish et al. (2015 – The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130, 1547), increased execution via PA leads to a decline in adverse selection costs, which underscores its potential as a trading mechanism for addressing latency arbitrage and the technological arms race.     

The effects of activity and geographic diversification on performance: Evidence from French financial institutions

Our paper studies the impact of activity and geographic diversification on financial institution's performance. These diversification strategies are complementary in generating performance and may provide important implications. Moreover, we investigate the interaction between these two strategies. Our dataset comprises 4532 years observations over the period of 2002 to 2012 and covers 412 French financial institutions. We find a negative relationship between diversification and performance. However, this relationship is significantly positive when institutions implement a dual diversification strategy. In this paper, we propose a classification of French financial institutions. For generalists’ banks and cooperative banks, we find similar results to those of the entire sample. Furthermore, for specialized financial institutions, the relationship is positive and significant. Our findings are robust to the potential endogeneity problem and to measures of diversification and performance.     

Volatility effects of institutional trading in foreign stocks

This paper examines the impact of institutional trades on volatility in international stocks across 43 countries. There is a temporary volatility spike during the trade execution period, merely reflecting the price impact costs faced by the institutions. Cross sectional regressions suggest that trade imbalances, enforcement of insider trading laws, stock prices, and an emerging market classification are positively associated with temporary volatility increases whereas the presence of market makers and better shareholders’ rights dampen such increases. In the long term, institutional trades do not destabilize markets as the levels of volatility after their trades are almost identical to their pre-decision levels.