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Finding Alpha
Praise for Finding Alpha "Eric Falkenstein is more than one of the smartest and funniest people in finance. He's been a banker, a key model builder at a major rating agency, and a hedge fund trader. In this tour de force, he outlines the successes and failures of financial theory applications in the real world from the perspective of an aggressive early adopter of the best ideas in finance. To this day, I think Eric's private firm default model is one of the best papers ever published in applied finance, and this wonderful book falls into the same category." —Donald R. van Deventer, PhD, founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kamakura Corporation "People dismissed Columbus when he said the w...
The Missing Risk Premium
Risk is the deviation from the consensus rather than an exposure to a covariance, and this implies there is no risk premium in general. It also implies that when there are a large number of people buying highly volatile assets, such assets will have negative returns in equilibrium. As there are several independent motivations for people to buy highly volatile assets, intuitively risky assets generally have lower-than-average returns. This novel conception of risk implies many things more consistent with the data than the current theory. Risk taking is an important life skill, so understanding its nature is important, and unfortunately academics who study it full-time are like so many other experts: when not irrelevant, 180 degrees wrong. This book explains the current asset pricing theory, and proposes an alternative, using theory and a unique survey of the data across many asset classes. Familiarity with some MBA level finance is helpful but not necessary to appreciate this book.
Preferences for Stock Characteristics as Revealed by Mutual Fund Portfolio Holdings
This investigation of the cross-section of mutual fund equity holdings for the years 1991 and 1992 shows that mutual funds have a significant preference towards firms with high visibility and low transaction costs, and are averse to stocks with low idiosyncratic volatility. These findings are relevant to theories concerning investor recognition, a potential agency problem in mutual funds, tests of trend-following and herd behavior by mutual funds, and corporate finance.
Why the Low Volatility Anomaly Will Persist
Common explanations of the low volatility anomaly involve biases or frictions that cause investors to overpay for high volatility assets, giving them a negative alpha within the CAPM model, yet currently all such mechanisms are either heuristic or partial equilibrium. This paper shows that leverage constraints of Frazzini and Pedersen (2014) alone cannot explain this result if there also exist rational investors. If 3 non-standard assumptions are added -- hybrid relative utility, delusional subset of investors, residual systematic risk across beta -- then we can capture several facts existing models cannot simultaneously capture: a positive return to the market, positive holdings by rational investors to negative CAPM-alpha stocks, and a negative Security Market Line. New data relevant to these assumptions are presented.
Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain
In recent decades, the culture, society, politics, and economics of Bahrain have been transformed, driving its global ambitions while retaining to a degree the rule of law and cosmopolitanism. Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain examines the transformation of Bahrain from the 1930s, from a regional trading port and then an important oil producer into the financial hub for the Gulf and into a global centre of Islamic finance. It focuses on the changes and tensions that transformation brought to Bahrain's political, legal, economic, religious, and social structures. In this book, Rajeswary Brown explores the rising force of youth populism driven by the persistence of poverty and unemployment, notably among rural Shi'ite communities and unemployed middle-class youth, as well as examining Bahrain's skillful reconciliation of the demands of Islamic faith, expressed in the Sharia, to the requirements of modern financial capitalism. In this, Bahrain's experience can be set against the modern history of much of the rest of the Middle East, most strikingly with respect to the position of Islamic charities, notably in Syria, comparisons of which are fully explored here.
Why Risk is Not Related to Return
This paper argues that in general risk is not empirically correlated with returns in any obvious way. This puzzle is explained as the implication of a utility function in which if people care only about relative wealth, risk is a deviation from what everyone else is doing, and therefore becomes avoidable and unpriced, similar to diversifiable risk in the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Using a utility or arbitrage argument, a relative status utility function creates a zero risk-return correlation via a market model that implies a zero risk premium, and has other applications.
Why Risk and Return are Uncorrelated
This paper presents a utility function refinement that explains the empirical irrelevance of risk to returns. The key is that in an environment where people care about relative wealth, risk is a deviation from what everyone else is doing, and therefore becomes like diversifiable risk in the CAPM, avoidable. Using an equilibrium or an arbitrage argument, a relative status oriented utility function creates a zero risk-return correlation via a market model that implies a zero risk premium. This approach is described as being theoretically consistent, intuitive and a better description of the data.
Riskcalc for Private Companies
This paper explains and documents many issues related to default prediction based on financial statements. The underlying methodology is completely revealed and addresses many important practicalities in empirical default estimation. Test statistics are also provided on various models using our proprietary, and unprecedently large database of US and Canadian firms. We outline the current context of these tools in the banking industry, and describe several popular modeling choices. A chapter on variable selection illustrates the dominance of various financial statements (e.g., liabilities/assets vs. liabilities/tangible assets). This approach represents how one of the best-known credit companies is approaching quantitative models at the outset of an international effort to provide credit benchmarks for middle market companies.
Asset Management and International Capital Markets
This innovative volume comprises a selection of original research articles offering a broad perspective on various dimensions of asset management in an international capital market environment. The topics covered include risk management and asset pricing models for portfolio management, performance evaluation and performance measurement of equity mutual funds as well as the wide range of bond portfolio management issues. Asset Management and International Capital Markets offers interesting new insights into state-of-the-art asset pricing and asset management research with a focus on international issues. Each chapter makes a valuable contribution to current research and literature, and will be of significant importance to the practice of asset management. This book is a compilation of articles originally published in The European Journal of Finance.
The C.F.A. Digest
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