Financial Education

Various studies have documented that the four-day period starting with the last trading day of a month and ending on the third trading day of the subsequent month accounts for the bulk of stock market returns. In the March/April 2008 Financial Analysts Journal McConnell and Xu show that this effect has persisted, and is not confined to small capitalization or low priced stocks. It occurs in 31 of the 35 countries they examined and does not appear to be caused by month-end buying pressure as measured by trading volume or equity fund money flows.

High quality securities markets are those that supply liquidity, transparency and assured completion.

Liquidity can be defined a number of ways:

• Tightness (low bid/ask spread)
• Depth (limited price impact from large trades)
• Resiliency (rapid adjustments for discrepancies between market price and intrinsic value)

Transparency means access to quotes is quick, easy and inexpensive. It also requires that trade details (size and price) are rapidly disseminated to the public.

Assurity of completion simply means that the counterparties of a trade can be trusted to honor the trade.

Persistent mispricings should attract profit-seeking investors to exploit them. This, in turn, should eventually cause the anomaly to disappear. There are several potential reasons for anomalies to persist.

Misunderstood Mispricings

Certain anomalies may not have a logical explanation, causing investors to be wary of trying to exploit them.

Costly Arbitrage

Particularly for less liquid securities, there may be significant costs involved in trading them. The higher the costs, the greater a mispricing must be in order for arbitrageurs to try to exploit it.

Insufficient Profit

Large investors, in particular, may find that certain mispricings do not offer a significant return for the time involved in identifying and exploiting them.

Trading Restrictions

Many investors have limits imposed on their activity, such as a prohibition on short selling. Such prohibitions can prevent investors from exploiting opportunities when identified.

In Technical Analysis Explained, Martin Pring notes that since there are three major financial markets (stocks, bonds and commodities) and each has two turning points in a given cycle, there are six turning points in each cycle. He calls these turning points the six stages and uses them as a reference point for identifying the current phase of the business cycle and by extension the next likely turning point.

Stage 1: Slowing growth rates or early recession. Interest rates start to fall and bonds rally.

Stage 2: Business cycle trough. Stocks begin to rally.

Stage 3: Late recession and early recovery. Commodities begin to rally.

Stage 4: Early recovery. Interest rates trough and bonds peak.

Stage 5: Cycle peak. Stocks peak.

Stage 6: Slowing growth, commodities peak.

Call based securities markets attempt to gather all the bids and asks for a security at a specific time, with the intent being to price a trade that will match the quantity demanded with the quantity supplied.

Many markets use a call system to set the opening price for securities. The opening price then reflects all the buy and sell orders placed since the previous close.

For individuals drawing on retirement funds, a 4% withdrawal rate is generally recommended to result in only a small chance of the portfolio running out of money. In the October 2007 Journal of Financial Planning Spitzer, Strieter and Singh simulate thousands of 30-year periods to assess the overall probability of running out of funds.

They find that a standard 50/50 split between stocks and bonds can allow for a 4.4% withdrawal rate with just a 10% chance of depleting funds. Withdrawal rates of up to 6% can be supported with stock allocations of 75% or more.

Portfolio management theory asserts, based on the variance between a given asset and the rest of the portfolio, that as few as 8-20 stocks are sufficient to provide most of the benefits of diversification.

In the November 2007 Financial Review Domian, Louton and Racine challenge this assumption by proposing that long-term investors are likely to be more concerned with shortfall risk (failure to reach a target ending wealth) than with return variance.

Based on the returns of 1,000 stocks and a safety first criterion, they find that at least 164 stocks are necessary to reduce shortfall risk to no more than a 1% chance of underperforming Treasury bonds. Although smaller portfolios can be enhanced by diversifying across industries, the benefit is not as powerful as that provided by simply adding more stocks to the portfolio.

Previous studies based on returns-based analysis have found no evidence of market-timing ability by mutual funds. In the December 2007 Journal of Financial Economics, Jiang Yao and Yu conduct a holdings-based analysis of 2,300 equity mutual funds and conclude that mutual fund managers have positive and statistically significant market timing ability for three- and six-month periods.

Mutual fund characteristics associated with positive market timing ability include high industry concentrations, large size, and small-capitalization orientations. The authors also find that stronger market timing results are associated with shifting between industries than by adjusting allocations within an industry.

When mutual funds experience large investor outflows, they must often quickly reduce their holdings to return funds to investors. Such forced liquidation can lead to asset sales at “fire sale” prices. In the November 2007 Journal of Financial Economics, Coval and Stafford show that mutual funds do not allow for the risk of such events, and that such flows are predictable - resulting in an incentive to front run the funds.

Funds in the highest and lowest deciles ranked by performance and prior outflows predictably face large inflows and outflows in subsequent periods. Investors can anticipate such flows by buying or selling the largest fund holdings ahead of the cash flows and reversing the position afterward.

The value premium refers to the fact that stocks with priced at a low multiple of book value tend to perform better than would be explained by the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) argue that the value premium results from a risk factor not captured by Beta. Opponents argue that the value premium is evidence that the EMH is not valid.

Fama and French, among others, have developed models that attribute the value premium to risk factors. Typically these studies use company size as a proxy for liquidity risk. In the Review of Finance, Phalippou replicates these studies in their original form, and then using institutional ownership as an alternative liquidity proxy. In this second iteration, the value premium persists and cannot be explained by the risk factor models.

Phalippou concludes that if the value premium is attributable to risk factors, the risk factors are not the ones identified in previous research.