Testing the effect of portfolio holdings disclosure in an environment absent of mandatory disclosure

This study examines a number of portfolio disclosure regimes with respect to accuracy and susceptibility to copycat behaviour in an environment absent of mandatory disclosure. We find that periodic portfolio disclosure tends to underestimate true excess performance as well as idiosyncratic risk in top‐quartile fund managers, with longer inter‐reporting intervals tending to result in greater differences. ‘Copycat funds’ following the disclosed holdings of top‐tier managers significantly underperform the underlying fund, while copycats following bottom‐tier managers significantly outperform the underlying fund. Our findings suggest that periodic reporting at monthly intervals or longer would not affect fund alpha generation.     

Prospect theory–based portfolio optimization: an empirical study and analysis using intelligent algorithms

The behaviourally based portfolio selection problem with investor’s loss aversion and risk aversion biases in portfolio choice under uncertainty is studied. The main results of this work are: developed heuristic approaches for the prospect theory model proposed by Kahneman and Tversky in 1979 as well as an empirical comparative analysis of this model and the index tracking model. The crucial assumption is that behavioural features of the prospect theory model provide better downside protection than traditional approaches to the portfolio selection problem. In this research the large-scale computational results for the prospect theory model have been obtained for real financial market data with up to 225 assets. Previously, as far as we are aware, only small laboratory tests (2–3 artificial assets) have been presented in the literature. In order to investigate empirically the performance of the behaviourally based model, a differential evolution algorithm and a genetic algorithm which are capable of dealing with a large universe of assets have been developed. Specific breeding and mutation, as well as normalization, have been implemented in the algorithms. A tabulated comparative analysis of the algorithms’ parameter choice is presented. The prospect theory model with the reference point being the index is compared to the index tracking model. A cardinality constraint has been implemented to the basic index tracking and the prospect theory models. The portfolio diversification benefit has been found. The aggressive behaviour in terms of returns of the prospect theory model with the reference point being the index leads to better performance of this model in a bullish market. However, it performed worse in a bearish market than the index tracking model. A tabulated comparative analysis of the performance of the two studied models is provided in this paper for in-sample and out-of-sample tests. The performance of the studied models has been tested out-of-sample in different conditions using simulation of the distribution of a growing market and simulation of the t-distribution with fat tails which characterises the dynamics of a decreasing or crisis market.     

政府债务增加降低了企业杠杆吗?

本文利用2010-2016年中国A股上市非金融企业的面板数据,实证检验了政府债务对企业杠杆的影响。结果表明,随着政府债务的扩张,企业杠杆率有所下降,同时相比于投资者投资组合对企业债券融资的挤出路径,政府部门对企业信贷融资的挤出路径影响更强。进一步研究发现,在不同地区和不同类型企业之间存在异质性,在股票市场发展较不完善的地区、对金融机构贷款依赖较高的地区和金融开放度较低的地区,挤出效应相对较强;在小规模企业、非国有企业和非从事公用事业的企业,挤出效应相对较强。在现阶段发展的背景下,地方政府应合理控制债务规模,在实现稳增长的同时减少对民营企业融资资金的挤占,重点关注国有企业的杠杆问题,发挥市场在资源配置中的作用。     

International channels of the Fed's unconventional monetary policy

Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve's large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields. We use dynamic term structure models to uncover to what extent signaling and portfolio balance channels caused these declines. For the U.S. and Canada, the evidence supports the view that LSAPs had substantial signaling effects. For Australian and German yields, signaling effects were present but likely more moderate, and portfolio balance effects appear to have played a relatively larger role than in the U.S. and Canada. Portfolio balance effects were small for Japanese yields and signaling effects basically nonexistent. These findings about LSAP channels are consistent with predictions based on interest rate dynamics during normal times: Signaling effects tend to be large for countries with strong yield responses to conventional U.S. monetary policy surprises, and portfolio balance effects are consistent with the degree of substitutability across international bonds, as measured by the covariance between foreign and U.S. bond returns.     

A jackknife-type estimator for portfolio revision

This article proposes a novel approach to portfolio revision. The current literature on portfolio optimization uses a somewhat naïve approach, where portfolio weights are always completely revised after a predefined fixed period. However, one shortcoming of this procedure is that it ignores parameter uncertainty in the estimated portfolio weights, as well as the biasedness of the in-sample portfolio mean and variance as estimates of the expected portfolio return and out-of-sample variance. To rectify this problem, we propose a jackknife procedure to determine the optimal revision intensity, i.e. the percent of wealth that should be shifted to the new, in-sample optimal portfolio. We find that our approach leads to highly stable portfolio allocations over time, and can significantly reduce the turnover of several well established portfolio strategies. Moreover, the observed turnover reductions lead to statistically and economically significant performance gains in the presence of transaction costs.     

Fiscal consolidations and bank balance sheets

We empirically investigate the effects of fiscal policy on bank balance sheets, focusing on episodes of fiscal consolidation. To this aim, we employ a very large data set of individual banks' balance sheets, combined with a newly compiled data set on fiscal consolidations. We find that standard capital adequacy ratios such as the Tier-1 ratio tend to improve following episodes of fiscal consolidation: for the median bank in our sample, a 1% of GDP fiscal consolidation increases the Tier-1 capital ratio by around 1.5 percentage points over two years. Our results suggest that this improvement results from a portfolio re-balancing from private to public debt securities which reduces the risk-weighted value of assets. In fact, if fiscal adjustment efforts are perceived as structural policy changes that improve the sustainability of public finances and, therefore, reduce credit risk, the banks' demand for government securities should increase relative to other assets.     

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR MANAGING INVESTMENTS

Abstract Stress and distress are unavoidable aspects of dealing with the vagaries of financial markets and financial advisers. The purpose of this paper is to try to reduce the discomfort in dealing with investment advisers, and to make the journey up and down the financial mountain a little less stressful and more satisfying. The commandments deal with defining investment policies precisely, diversifying asset classes, choosing a consistent benchmark for investment policies, structuring precisely the asset allocation process, defining risk and risk management procedures, monitoring the portfolio carefully, matching the allocation and investment horizons, being active or passive according to investment policies, being agnostic about model forecasts and being aware that, while buy low and sell high is a truism, investors and financial advisers are only human and therefore make mistakes.     

Religious‐based portfolio selection

We examine religious attendance and portfolio selection decisions for an individual with religious beliefs within a continuous-time framework. Our findings are three-fold. First, religious contributions increase with wealth capital, the degree of religious devotion, and an increase in the wage level. Second, religious attendance positively relates to wealth capital and the performance of stock investments, but negatively correlates with wage return rates. Third, participation in religious activities can result in declining demand for risky asset investments. Theoretically, this study explains how individuals’ portfolio choices correlate with their religious activities.     

Could making banks hold only liquid assets induce bank runs?

Restrictions placed on bank portfolios are analyzed in a banking model designed to capture the role of checking accounts in facilitating transactions. Forcing banks to hold only liquid assets creates the incentive for liquidity-based runs. Even when a run does not occur, welfare is reduced as a result of overinvestment in the liquid asset.     

Trading frequency and the efficiency of price discovery in a non-dealer market

The increasing popularity of non-dealer security markets that offer automated, computer-based, continuous trading reflects a presumption that institutionally-set trading sessions are economically obsolete. This theoretical paper investigates the effect of the trading frequency, a key feature of the trading mechanism, on the efficiency of price discovery in a non-dealer market. By tracing the market pricing error to the correlation structures of arriving information and pricing errors of individual traders, the effect of diverging expectations on error-based and overall return volatility is isolated. The analysis reveals that, due to a portfolio effect, an increase in the trading time interval has contradictory effects on the portion of return volatility stemming from pricing errors. The greater accumulation of information increases error-based return volatility, but the greater volume and number of traders per session have the opposite effect. The net effect on overall return volatility can go either way. It is found that the return volatility of heavily traded securities is likely to be minimized under continuous trading, but that of thinly traded securities may be minimized under discrete trading at moderate time intervals. The latter is more likely to occur the greater is the divergence of expectations among traders. These findings challenge the presumption that automated continuous trading in a non-dealer market is more efficient than discrete trading for all securities, regardless of trading volume. The findings are applicable to all economies, but have special importance for developing countries where typically a single market is dominated by small issues and a low volume of trade. As a by-product of the analysis, it is shown how to correct the biased estimate of inter-session price volatility when observations are less frequent than the trading sessions themselves.