Modelling momentum winner/loser asymmetry: the sources of winner and loser returns in the ASX200 and S&P500

There is an established body of work showing that the sources of momentum returns change over time. This paper finds that there is also winner/loser asymmetry – that the sources of the winner and loser components of momentum returns differ from each other at the same point in time. Together, these results raise concerns about the prospect of finding a single cause for momentum profits, as most efforts to date have tried to do. Rather, they indicate that investigation should proceed using time‐varying, nonparametric and ensemble techniques.     

A brief history of market efficiency

Every finance professional employs the concept of market efficiency. The theory, evidence and counter-evidence focus on a couple of dozen highly influential articles published during the twentieth century. We summarise the origins of and interlinkages between these contributions to the history of finance.     

When bad news is good news: Geopolitical risk and the cross-section of emerging market stock returns

Using a news-based gauge of geopolitical risk, we study its role in asset pricing in global emerging markets. We find that changes in risk positively predict future stock returns. The countries with the highest increase in geopolitical uncertainty outperform their counterparts with the lowest change by up to 1% per month. The anomaly is not explained by other established asset pricing effects and remains robust to many considerations. We link the observed phenomenon with investor overreaction to geopolitical news driven by the availability bias.     

Ted's Teas: A Two-Part Accounting and Audit “Crossover Case”*

This fictional case is based on a real specialty tea company in Nova Scotia. Ted's Teas is a two-part crossover case that illustrates the integration of financial accounting and audit learning outcomes applied to real-world scenarios. In Part 1, students assume the role of an internal accountant and apply knowledge of the Chartered Professional Accountants (CPA) of Canada's CPA Way to identify how to treat leases, changes in policy, and estimates as part of accounting knowledge under both Accounting Standards for Private Enterprises and IFRS frameworks. In Part 2, students “cross over” and change roles, so they are now external auditors for Ted's Teas, tasked to provide an analysis of risk of material misstatement, recommend an audit approach, and develop substantive procedures. This two-part case presents opportunities for students to demonstrate technical competence in multiple areas, either separately in two different courses or combined in one “capstone” or case course. The case and teaching notes, including the marking rubrics, were adapted from principles used to train and evaluate CPA Professional Education Program candidates, tailored to an appropriate level for undergraduate and graduate learners.     

Liquidity and asset pricing: Evidence from the Chinese stock markets

We introduce a novel two-factor model, incorporating market and liquidity factors, which outperforms the CAPM and Fama–French factor models when applied to stock market returns in Shanghai and Shenzhen over 2000–2019. We compute the liquidity factor as the return on a liquidity-mimicking portfolio, which we construct simultaneously using two measures of liquidity (one of them capturing liquidity’s trading-quantity dimension, and the other associated with its price-impact dimension). Unlike the CAPM and Fama–French factor models, the advocated two-factor model is able to account for numerous return anomalies, such as size, book-to-market ratio, earnings-to-price ratio, cash-flow-to-price ratio, return-on-equity, and volatility. The model’s performance is similar when applied separately to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets. Furthermore, it fares similarly over the 1994–2004 and 2005–2019 sub-periods. This result is somewhat surprising, because liquidity seems likely to have been substantially lower over 1994–2004, as the Chinese markets were noticeably smaller, and the critical market reform aimed at eliminating non-tradable shares by the end of 2006 did not occur until 2005.     

Exchange-traded fund ownership and underlying stock mispricing

In response to the increasing proliferation of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and a warning from the Wall Street hero Michael Burry that passive investing has put the stock market into ‘bubble’ territory, we examine the relation between stock ownership by ETFs and mispricing from 2002 to 2018. We find that increased ETF ownership induces overpricing in underlying stocks. We then identify three mechanisms for this relationship: the overpricing of stocks attributable to increased ETF ownership is stronger for stocks that experience an increase in passive ETF ownership; during periods characterised by high investor sentiment; and for illiquid stocks. Our results are robust to a battery of tests including alternative measures for all key variables and are not confounded by the global financial crisis. Additional analyses show that mispricing caused by ETF ownership change is not driven by firm fundamentals and does not exacerbate stocks' information environment around earnings announcement.     

Do risk exposures explain accounting anomalies? A new testing method

I quantitatively evaluate how much of the cross-sectional return predictive ability of a range of accounting anomalies can be attributed to firm-specific stock return covariances with market risk factors. Using a novel two-step regression-based testing method, I find robust evidence that the risk factor exposures do not explain a meaningful fraction of the time-series variations in the return predictive coefficients of the anomaly variables. Out-of-sample tests further confirm that it is the mispricing component of the accounting anomalies that is mainly responsible for the return predictability.