The Effect of the Alternation in the Ruling Party on Three-Factor Risks and Returns in ETF: The Case of Presidential Elections in Taiwan

This study discusses the effect of alternation in the ruling party in presidential elections on three-factor risks and returns of the three main exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Taiwan, which has an unclearly defined international status and whose citizens have the right to vote directly for the president. We find that after the ruling party has been determined, in the period between Election Day and inauguration day, both the stock market and ETFs show a slight rise in prices. This suggests that most investors are initially optimistic after the election results have been announced. Meanwhile, the reverse book-to-market risk value deteriorates significantly. These results indicate that political uncertainty increases the risk premium of market factors and reverse book-to-market factors for some ETFs.     

A note on assessing the relation between CEO characteristics and stock performance: Alpha Above Replacement

Many studies examine the relation between stock performance and CEO characteristics. We approach the topic in a different way, using the alphas generated by the Fama‐French three‐factor model as the dependent variable in a CEO characteristic model. We find several traits are significantly related to alpha. CEOs who are younger, own a larger fraction of firm equity and hold a graduate degree provide greater alphas. CEOs who are also the founder of the firm deliver larger alphas. Our results provide useful information for boards assessing the performance of CEOs and considering CEO succession.     

Portfolio concentration and mutual fund performance

Mutual fund managers should choose to increase their portfolio concentration when their information set is valuable enough that the benefits of the expected increase in alpha more than offsets the costs of the expected increase in idiosyncratic volatility. Consistent with that idea, we find that fund performance improves after concentration increases. Because the expected costs of increased concentration vary between funds and over time, the required expected benefits before managers choose to increase concentration should also vary. Among other results, we show that the concentration-performance relation is stronger for funds with less institutional ownership and when investor sentiment is low.     

Alpha or beta in the eye of the beholder: What drives hedge fund flows?

Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) alpha explains hedge fund flows better than alphas from more sophisticated models. This suggests that investors pool together sophisticated model alpha with returns from exposures to traditional (except for the market) and exotic risks. We decompose performance into traditional and exotic risk components and find that while investors chase both components, they place greater relative emphasis on returns associated with exotic risk exposures that can only be obtained through hedge funds. However, we find little evidence of persistence in performance from traditional or exotic risks, which cautions against investors’ practice of seeking out risk exposures following periods of recent success.     

Análisis de portafolio por sectores mediante el uso de algoritmos genéticos: caso aplicado a la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores

The type of industry, size of company, number of employees, etc. are variables that are considered as control variables in a large number of articles. In this research we consider the sector variable as a determinant of financial performance (Baird et al. 2012) and the risk (Artikis and Nifora, 2011) rather than as a control variable. This paper analyzes six sectors of the Mexican economy divided according to the Mexican Stock Exchange: industrial, basic consumer products, materials, non basic consumer products, telecommunications and financial services. The sample consists of Mexican companies, that is, 30 companies in the 2007-2012 period. To measure portfolio performance two classic indicators are used: (1) Jensen alpha and (2) Sharpe ratio, and also conditional metrics are used that measures the number of times the portfolio return exceeds the market average. The goal is to find a portfolio that maximizes these parameters and compare the results between the different sectors under study. Due to a nonlinear programming problem, genetic algorithms are used to obtain the optimal portfolio that maximizes these metrics. The results show a better risk-adjusted financial performance in the field of materials and financial services and a lower performance in such sectors as the industrial and telecommunications ones.     

Performance maximization of actively managed funds

A growing literature suggests that, even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options on the benchmarks or trading frequently can generate positive alpha. The ratio of alpha to its tracking error appraises a fund's performance. This paper derives the performance-maximizing strategy, which turns out to be a variant of a buy-write strategy, and the least upper bound on such performance enhancement. If common equity indices are used as benchmarks, the potential alpha generated from trading frequently can be substantial in magnitude, but it carries considerable risk. The statistical significance in estimated alpha is low, and the probability of a negative alpha is high. The performance enhancement from holding options can be significant - both economically and statistically - if the options' implied volatilities are higher than the volatilities of the benchmark returns. The performance-maximizing strategy derived in this paper is different from the strategies that switch portfolio exposure to the benchmarks. The exposure-switching strategies are not promising unless the switching is based on superior information.     

Photoshop的常用存储格式分析

使用图像处理软件会遇到多种文件存储格式的选择问题，文章通过对十四种常用存储格式的介绍，详细说明了各种存储格式的特性和应用注意事项。     

Decomposing mutual fund alpha into security selection and security weighting

I decompose mutual fund alpha into two components: which stocks a mutual fund selects and what weights are placed in those stocks. Although related, each decision has a distinguishable impact on portfolio alpha. I show that deciding how to weight securities is of greater importance than deciding which securities to select. The ability to generate weighting alpha persisting for 12 months while the ability to generate selecting alpha persists for just one. Finally, the performance of mutual funds that both accurately weight and select securities persists for one month and results in significant outperformance.     

Evaluating fund capacity: issues and methods

We examine the issues and methods involved in evaluating the size that an equity fund might attain before it becomes unable to create additional value for investors. We discuss how capacity is defined, identify ten drivers and outline methods for conducting capacity analysis. We detail models that predict capacity, assuming that a fund adjusts the manner in which it trades and constructs portfolios as funds under management grow. We also provide an overview of transaction cost modelling, which is integral to predicting capacity. This study is primarily intended as an aid for investment industry participants who wish to evaluate the capacity associated with a given investment signal.     

Improved inference for fund alphas using high-dimensional cross-sectional tests

The traditional fund-by-fund alpha inference suffers from various econometric problems (e.g., cross-sectional independence assumption, lack of power, time-invariant coefficient assumption, multiple-hypothesis-testing). Recognizing the panel nature of fund industries, we tailor four high-dimensional cross-sectional tests to shed light into both the zero-alpha hypothesis and ratio of non-zero alphas. Particularly, we augment Gagliardini et al. (2016) with a time-varying alpha estimator. Our results reject the zero-alpha joint hypothesis as the statistical significance of alphas is too high to be explained by luck. After controlling for luck, our empirical studies show that the power enhancement helps to identify a large portion of significant fund alphas, which cannot be achieved using the usual Wald test. Meanwhile, the time-varying approach shows that fund alphas diverge during the late 2000s Global Financial Crisis, which cannot be observed using the time-invariant model. Overall, relative to the literature, we draw a more accurate and complete picture, and provide several powerful tools for future research.