Are performance based arbitrage effects detectable? Evidence from merger arbitrage

This paper examines the predictions of the performance based arbitrage hypothesis for the merger arbitrage market. Performance based arbitrage [Shleifer, A., Vishny, R.W., 1997. The limits of arbitrage. Journal of Finance, 52 (1), 35–55] is the notion that funds under management are withdrawn from arbitrageurs following trading losses, resulting in inefficient prices for securities subject to arbitrage trades. I examine general comovement in merger arbitrage spreads and the response of spreads to large arbitrage losses and substantial changes in deal flow. I find little evidence that merger arbitrage spreads exhibit systematic comovement or are substantially affected by important liquidity events in this market.     

Limited arbitrage between equity and credit markets

We document that short-horizon pricing discrepancies across firms' equity and credit markets are common and that an economically significant proportion of these are anomalous, indicating a lack of integration between the two markets. Proposing a statistical measure of market integration, we investigate whether equity–credit market integration is related to impediments to arbitrage. We find that time variation in integration across a firm's equity and credit markets is related to firm-specific impediments to arbitrage such as liquidity in equity and credit markets and idiosyncratic risk. Our evidence provides a potential resolution to the puzzle of why Merton model hedge ratios match empirically observed stock-bond elasticities (Schaefer and Strebulaev, 2008) and yet the model is limited in its ability to explain the integration between equity and credit markets (Collin-Dufresne, Goldstein, and Martin, 2001).     

人民币外汇期权市场定价分析和政策研究

人民币外汇期权市场在逐步发展当中,针对其定价水平的分析研究方兴未艾。从构造两种不同的套利组合出发,对两个期限不同在值水平的人民币外汇期权进行了套利分析,发现：人民币外汇期权市场定价偏高,长期限期权定价更高。对此分析了其中原因,并给出了相应的政策建议。     

Market risk exposure of merger arbitrage in Australia

We investigate the risk‐return characteristics of merger arbitrage in the Australian market for corporate control, whereby hedge fund managers acquire companies subject to a takeover offer. On average, a strategy of buying target companies and short‐selling bidders making scrip offers would have generated an annual return of 30 per cent from 1985 to 2008, excluding transaction costs, compared to the return on the broader market of 12 per cent. However, performance is not market neutral, being positively associated with market returns during downturns and inversely related to market movements during rising markets. The payoffs to this strategy are analogous to a short straddle, whereby the investor is short a call and put option at the same exercise price. These results are consistent with large‐sample evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom and have not previously been documented in Australia, in which prior evidence is based only on cash deals during the 1990s.     

Risk shifting and regulatory arbitrage: Evidence from operational risk

We document a robust negative relation between operational risk exposure and bank capital levels for a sample of large U.S. banks under the Basel I Capital Accords. The results are consistent with the notion that capital-constrained banks increased operational risk exposure at the time when Basel I regulations did not require an explicit capital charge for operational risk. More broadly, our results show new channel by which financial regulations incentivize banks to shift their risk taking to less regulated risk areas. We focus on the case of operational risk because it went from a largely unregulated risk type to a major risk that accounts for about 25% of large U.S. banks’ risk-weighted assets.     

The fragile capital structure of hedge funds and the limits to arbitrage

During a financial crisis, when investors are most in need of liquidity and accurate prices, hedge funds cut their arbitrage positions and hoard cash. The paper explains this phenomenon. We argue that the fragile nature of the capital structure of hedge funds, combined with low market liquidity, creates a risk of coordination in redemptions among hedge fund investors that severely limits hedge funds' arbitrage capabilities. We present a model of hedge funds' optimal asset allocation in the presence of coordination risk among investors. We show that hedge fund managers behave conservatively and even abstain from participating in the market once coordination risk is factored into their investment decisions. The model suggests a new source of limits to arbitrage.     

Profit Possibilities in Currency Markets: Arbitrage, Hedging, and Speculation

This paper reviews and extends the existing literature on covered arbitrage, delineates the conditions for profitable arbitrage with the hedging instruments of forward and options contracts in the foreign exchange markets, and defines the maximum possible profits out of a given market environment. Next, the simple rules on speculation are articulated with and without transaction costs, and then we show how speculation can be covered with options and forwards. Finally, speculation is integrated with arbitrage and hedging, and further compounding of profit possibilities is illustrated.     

Behavioral currency hedging for international portfolios

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate behavioral issues as it relates to the active currency hedging of international portfolios in the context of traditional expected utility maximization approach. The uniqueness of the approach is that separate risk aversion parameters are introduced for asset and currency markets. The paper is similar in spirit to Black (Black, F. 1989, Universal hedging, Financial Analysts Journal (July-August), 16-22.), who argued that a portion of foreign equity investments should be permanently unhedged, which is basically postulating that one should take a buy-and-hold position in currency with a fraction of the capital. The behavioral twist included in the traditional expected utility maximization approach results in lower hedge ratios, ceteris paribus, partly due to the asymmetric nature of the compensation structure of currency managers.Since the asymmetric nature of incentive schemes of asset and currency managers dictates how one optimizes the investment portfolio of a pension or endowment fund, the unusual behavior of a given institutional fund manager should not be called “irrational,” only because the optimal currency hedging level deviates from the one derived under rational expectations. This only justifies the use of different hedging strategies by various institutional investors. We describe in detail how the level of hedging should be revised downwards because of behavioral factors. Conclusions are in the context of what people would predict to see in the market, if certain investors behave in an “irrational” way.     

Overcoming limits of arbitrage: Theory and evidence

Limits to arbitrage arise because financial intermediaries may face funding constraints when mispricing worsens. Using a model with limits to arbitrage, where we allow arbitrageurs to secure capital even in case of underperformance, we show that arbitrageurs that are more protected from withdrawals have more mean-reverting and volatile returns. Using data on hedge fund performance, we find robust support for these hypotheses: Funds with contractual impediments to withdrawals, and funds with performance-insensitive outflows, recover more quickly after a bad year and have more volatile returns. Our evidence is consistent with the idea that some hedge funds overcome the limits to arbitrage.     

Evidence of governance arbitrage by private equity sponsors

The motivation for private equity bids is not well understood, partly due to the private nature of their activity. This research contributes to understanding the merits of current-day private equity by examining whether ineffective governance of target public corporations contributes to the role that private equity fulfils. I examine the characteristics of large public target firms that receive a private equity bid to investigate the evidence that private equity is motivated to address ineffective governance. I find evidence the private equity is motivated by what is referred to as governance arbitrage and that this role is heightened when there are constraints such as the imposition of uniform governance practices within public corporations.     

Bank regulatory arbitrage via risk weighted assets dispersion

Increased dispersion of Risk Weighted Assets (RWA) troubles regulators as potentially undermining prudential supervision. We study the determinants of RWA/EAD (Exposure-At-Default) on data painstakingly compiled from Basel Pillar-Three for 239 European banks over 2007–2013. We improve on most previous studies, which consider instead RWA/TA (Total Assets). Indeed, Internal-Rating-Based (IRB) models allow lawful capital-saving Roll-Out effects which RWA/TA analyses disregard and likely misidentify as regulatory arbitrage. Instead, encapsulating Roll-Out effects, RWA/EAD avoids false positive identification. We find that regulatory arbitrage: (i) was present; (ii) likely materialized via risk weights manipulation with IRB models; (iii) was stronger at Advanced-IRB vs Foundation-IRB banks.     

The Fundamental Theorem of Derivative Trading - exposition,extensions and experiments

When estimated volatilities are not in perfect agreement with reality, delta-hedged option portfolios will incur a non-zero profit-and-loss over time. However, there is a surprisingly simple formula for the resulting hedge error, which has been known since the late 1990s. We call this The Fundamental Theorem of Derivative Trading. This paper is a survey with twists on that result. We prove a more general version of it and discuss various extensions and applications, from incorporating a multi-dimensional jump framework to deriving the Dupire–Gyöngy–Derman–Kani formula. We also consider its practical consequences, both in simulation experiments and on empirical data, thus demonstrating the benefits of hedging with implied volatility.     

Relative arbitrage in volatility-stabilized markets

Summary. We provide simple, easy-to-test criteria for the existence of relative arbitrage in equity markets. These criteria postulate essentially that the excess growth rate of the market portfolio, a positive quantity that can be estimated or even computed from a given market structure, be sufficiently large. We show that conditions which satisfy these criteria are manifestly present in the U.S. equity market. We then construct examples of abstract markets in which the criteria hold. These abstract markets allow us to isolate conditions similar to those prevalent in actual markets, and to construct explicit portfolios under these conditions. We study in some detail a specific example of an abstract market which is volatility-stabilized, in that the return from the market portfolio has constant drift and variance rates while the smallest stocks are assigned the largest volatilities. A rather interesting probabilistic structure emerges, in which time changes and the asymptotic theory for planar Brownian motion play crucial roles. The largest stock and the overall market grow at the same, constant rate, though individual stocks fluctuate widely.We are indebted to Adrian Banner and Constantinos Kardaras for several helpful discussions; in particular, the computation of (4.27) is due to Adrian Banner. We are also grateful to Professors Chris Rogers and Marc Yor for their expert advice on the subject of planar Brownian motion, and to Professor Peter Bank for an observation that helped us correct an error in an earlier version of the paper.This revised version was published online in January 2005 with corrections to the Cover date.     

Optimal portfolio selection in nonlinear arbitrage spreads

This paper analytically solves the portfolio optimization problem of an investor faced with a risky arbitrage opportunity (e.g. relative mispricing in equity pairs). Unlike the extant literature, which typically models mispricings through the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) process, we introduce a nonlinear generalization of OU which jointly captures several important risk factors inherent in arbitrage trading. While these factors are absent from the standard OU, we show that considering them yields several new insights into the behavior of rational arbitrageurs: Firstly, arbitrageurs recognizing these risk factors exhibit a diminishing propensity to exploit large mispricings. Secondly, optimal investment behavior in light of these risk factors precipitates the gradual unwinding of losing trades far sooner than is entailed in existing approaches including OU. Finally, an empirical application to daily FTSE100 pairs data shows that incorporating these risks renders our model's risk-management capabilities superior to both OU and a simple threshold strategy popular in the literature. These observations are useful in understanding the role of arbitrageurs in enforcing price efficiency.     

Multivariate regression tests of the arbitrage pricing theory: The instrumental-variables approach

This article expands the theoretical basis upon which empirical testing of the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) rests. Specifically, it specifies linear restrictions for worlds in which the APT holds. These restrictions may, in principle, be tested. Since the regressors in the model are only “noisy” proxies for a specific linear transformation of the factors or mimicking portfolios, testing regressions suffer from an errors-in-variables problem. The standard econometric treatment for this problem is the instrumental-variables approach. A size-based example is employed to compare the test results derived from the instrumental-variables approach to those obtained via the ordinary least squares (OLS) method. The results from both methods cannot reject a two-factor APT for the size-sorted portfolio sample. The authors appreciate the helpful comments of Edwin Burmeister, Raymond Chiang, Steve Pruitt, participant at the 1989 Western Finance Association annual meetings, Indiana University, and University of Miami, and especially Shmuel Kandel.     

New entry,strategic diversity and efficiency in soccer betting markets: the creation and suppression of arbitrage opportunities

ABSTRACT

We find that prices offered by competing bookmakers within the same quote-driven soccer (football) betting market provide arbitrage opportunities. However, the management practices of bookmakers prevent informed bettors exploiting these in practice. We identify two groups of bookmakers, ‘position-takers’ and ‘book-balancers’. Position-takers alter their odds infrequently, while actively restricting informed traders. Book-balancers actively manage inventory by adjusting odds, and place few restrictions on their customers. We identify 545 arbitrage portfolios, and find that around 50% would require a bet on the favourite at the position-taking bookmaker. The management practices of position-takers generally prevent these opportunities being exploited in practice.     

Price reversal,transaction costs,and arbitrage profits in the real estate securities market

This paper studies the return reversals of exchange traded real estate securities using an arbitrage portfolio approach. Using the approach, we find that there exist significant return reversals in such securities. These return reversals could be exploited by arbitrage traders if trading costs can be ignored. However, the arbitrage profits disappear after deducting trading costs and taking into account the implicit cost of bid-ask spread. Thus, the real estate securities market is efficient at weekly intervals in the sense that one could not exploit the price reversals via some simple trading rules.     

Diversity and relative arbitrage in equity markets

An equity market is called diverse if no single stock is ever allowed to dominate the entire market in terms of relative capitalization. In the context of the standard Itô-process model initiated by Samuelson (1965) we formulate this property (and the allied, successively weaker notions of weak diversity and asymptotic weak diversity) in precise terms. We show that diversity is possible to achieve, but delicate. Several examples are provided which illustrate these notions and show that weakly-diverse markets contain relative arbitrage opportunities: it is possible to outperform or underperform such markets over any given time-horizon. The existence of this type of relative arbitrage does not interfere with the development of contingent claim valuation, and has consequences for the pricing of long-term warrants and for put-call parity. Several open questions are suggested for further study.Received: January 2004, Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 60H10, 91B28; 60J55JEL Classification: G10We are grateful for the helpful remarks offered by seminar audiences at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the Sloan School of MIT, Boston University, the Mathematical Institute in Oberwolfach, and the Universities of Athens, Connecticut/Storrs and Texas/Austin. Special thanks go to Professors Jérôme Detemple, Julien Hugonnier, Ralf Korn, Andrew Lo, Mark Lowenstein and Steven Shreve. We are also indebted to Dr. Adrian Banner for a number of discussions that helped sharpen our thinking about these problems, and to the referees and editors for suggestions that improved the exposition. A significant part of this work was completed in the spring semester of 2002, while the second author was on sabbatical leave at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University. He is grateful to the Foundation for its hospitality.