Value investing or investing in illiquidity?The profitability of contrarian investment strategies, revisited

Background:We investigate whether the success of contrarian investment strategies can be attributed to differences in the relative illiquidity of stocks categorized as value investments versus those categorized as glamour portfolios.Methods:Following Lakonishok et al.(J Financ 49:1541–1578,1994),we assess the illiquidity characteristics of portfolios that underlie contrarian investment strategies that are based on the level of stock’s book to market.Results:We find strong evidence that those portfolios characterized as value investments are associated with dramatically greater levels of illiquidity than glamour portfolios.We further demonstrate that strategies based on the illiquidity in the year prior to portfolio formation result in return characteristic of ostensibly contrarian strategies.Conclusions:These results suggest that the higher returns associated with contrarian investment strategies are the result of the higher illiquidity associated with value portfolios and represent compensation that the investor receives for accepting illiquidity.They also suggest that researchers should be cautious before attributing apparent anomalies to behavior-driven expectational errors rather than to other attributes unrelated to behavior,such as illiquidity.

Detecting the lead–lag effect in stock markets:definition,patterns,and investment strategies

Human activities widely exhibit a power-law distribution.Considering stock trading as a typical human activity in the financial domain,the first aim of this paper is to validate whether the well-known power-law distribution can be observed in this activity.Interestingly,this paper determines that the number of accumulated lead–lag days between stock pairs meets the power-law distribution in both the U.S.and Chinese stock markets based on 10 years of trading data.Based on this finding this paper adopts the power-law distribution to formally define the lead–lag effect,detect stock pairs with the lead–lag effect,and then design a pure lead–lag investment strategy as well as enhancement investment strategies by integrating the lead–lag strategy into classic alpha-factor strategies.Tests conducted on 20 different alpha-factor strategies demonstrate that both perform better than the selected benchmark strategy and that the lead–lag strategy provides useful signals that significantly improve the performance of basic alpha-factor strategies.Our results therefore indicate that the lead–lag effect may provide effective information for designing more profitable investment strategies.

Optimal Reinsurance and Investment Strategies for Insurers with Regime-Switching and State-Dependent Utility Function

This paper considers a proportional reinsurance-investment problem and an excess-of-loss reinsurance-investment problem for an insurer,where price processes of the risky assets and wealth process of the insurer are both described by Markovian regime switching.The target of the insurer is assumed to maximize the expected exponential utility from her terminal wealth with a state-dependent utility function.By employing the dynamic programming approach,the optimal value functions and the optimal reinsurance-investment strategies are derived.In addition,the impact of some parameters on the optimal strategies and the optimal value functions is analyzed,and lots of interesting results are discovered,such as the conclusion that excess-of-loss reinsurance is better than proportional reinsurance is not held in the regime-switching jump-diffusion model.

Extremely thin but very robust:Surprising cryptogam trait combinations at the end of the leaf economics spectrum

Leaf economics spectrum(LES)describes the fundamental trade-offs between leaf structural,chemical,and physiological investments.Generally,structurally robust thick leaves with high leaf dry mass per unit area(LMA)exhibit lower photosynthetic capacity per dry mass(Amass).Paradoxically,“soft and thinleaved”mosses and spikemosses have very low Amass,but due to minute-size foliage elements,their LMA and its components,leaf thickness(LT)and density(LD),have not been systematically estimated.Here,we characterized LES and associated traits in cryptogams in unprecedented details,covering five evolutionarily different lineages.We found that mosses and spikemosses had the lowest LMA and LT values ever measured for terrestrial plants.Across a broad range of species from different lineages,Amass and LD were negatively correlated.In contrast,Amass was only related to LMA when LMA was greater than 14 g cm^(-2).In fact,low Amass reflected high LD and cell wall thickness in the studied cryptogams.We conclude that evolutionarily old plant lineages attained poorly differentiated,ultrathin mesophyll by increasing LD.Across plant lineages,LD,not LMA,is the trait that represents the trade-off between leaf robustness and physiology in the LES.

Mobile telecommunication companies’investment and pricing strategies for content service

Several mobile telecommunication companies(MTCs),such as AT&T,Verizon,and China Mobile,are investing in content services to drive continued growth as the telecom industry has become saturated.In this study,we investigate the competition between two MTCs,one of which(MTC 1)provides both data and content services,while the other(MTC 2)provides only data services.We propose a two-stage game-theoretic model to analyze the two MTCs'optimal pricing strategies for data service and content service as well as the investment strategy for the content service.Our analysis reveals that a higher value of value-added service offered by MTC 1 will incentivize it to raise its subscription fee for the content service and induce both MTCs to reduce the prices of their data services,which results in an increased demand for the content service and a decreased demand for MTC 2's data service.As MTC 1 invests further in the quality of the content service,it would benefit from increasing the subscription fee for the content service,and the two MTCs should increase the subscription fee for the data service.However,compared to the decisions in the scenario where MTC 1 does not provide content service,the provision of this service by MTC 1 leads to a lower subscription fee for the two MTCs'data services,an increase in the demand for MTC 1's data service,and a decrease in the demand for MTC 2's data service.These findings reveal that regularly monitoring market competition,as well as adjusting pricing strategies based on market scenarios and the value of services,can enhance competitiveness and long-term profitability for MTCs.

Franchise Value Change Information of State-owned Commercial Bank and Securities Investment Risk

The investment strategy choice of state-owned commercial bank is related to its franchise value change information. This paper analyzes the franchise value change information of state-owned commercial bank. The franchise value change information shows that the franchise value of state-owned Commercial Bank is descending. Along with the descending of the franchise value, state-owned commercial bank strengthens its high risk investment motive when it chooses its investment strategy. State-owned commercial bank tends to run the high risk of investing securities because its investment variety is very sparse. Based on the theoretical principle of how to control securities investment risk, this paper proposes some countermeasures and suggestions that state-owned commercial bank strengthen the control of its securities investment risk in order to perfect its investment strategy.

QFII in China Security Market： Status Quo and Investment Strategy

This paper firstly introduces the definition and features of QFII, and then mainly analyzes the QFII＇s portfolio performance and investment yield, as welt as stock market. And at last, it refers to the impacts of QFII＇s companies and supervision systems in China security market. the investment ideas and strategies of QFII in China investment styles and strategies on investors, listed

The Optimal Investment Strategy Based on the DEA Model

The Goodgrant Foundation is a charitable organization that wants to improve education performance of undergraduates attending colleges and universities in the US. So the foundation plans to contribute a total of US 50 million for a suitable team of schools per year under the condition of avoiding repeated other large grant organizations’ investment. The DEA (Data Estimate Analysis) model is developed to determine an optimal investment strategy for the Goodgrant Foundation. In this paper, two questions were solved: how to choose a suitable team of schools and how to allocate the investment. Before the establishment of the model, the EXCEL software is used to preprocess data. Then the DEA model which includes two models in the paper is developed. For the first question, the CCR model is established to rank schools which used efficiency from DEAP 2.1. For the second question, the resource allocation model is established to allocate investment amount by weights of allocation from MATLAB software. Accordingly, the optimal investment strategy is received for the Goodgrant Foundation. Through the analysis above, 23 from 293 schools are selected to invest. Then the schools are ranked and the investment of US 50 million for 23 schools is allocated.

Optimal Portfolio Selection with Delay under the Framework of Uncertainty Theory

This study focuses on investigating the optimal investment strategy for an optimization problem with delay using the uncertainty theory. The financial market is composed of a risk-free asset and a risk asset with an uncertain price process described by an uncertain differential equation. An optimization problem is assumed that its objective is a nonlinear function of decision variable. By deriving the equation of optimality, an analytical solution is obtained for the optimal delay investment strategy, and the optimal delay value function. Finally, an economic analysis and numerical sensitivity analysis are conducted to evaluate the research results.

DeepPricing:pricing convertible bonds based on financial time-series generative adversarial networks

Convertible bonds are an important segment of the corporate bond market,however,as hybrid instruments,convertible bonds are difficult to value because they depend on variables related to the underlying stock,the fixed-income part,and the interaction between these components.Besides,embedded options,such as conversion,call,and put provisions are often restricted to certain periods,may vary over time,and are subject to additional path-dependent features of the state variables.Moreover,the most challenging problem in convertible bond valuation is the underlying stock return process modeling as it retains various complex statistical properties.In this paper,we propose DeepPricing,a novel data-driven convertible bonds pricing model,which is inspired by the recent success of generative adversarial networks(GAN),to address the above challenges.The method introduces a new financial time-series generative adversarial networks(FinGAN),which is able to reproduce risk-neutral stock return process that retains the unique statistical properties such as the fat-tailed distributions,the long-range dependence,and the asymmetry structure etc.,and then transit to its risk-neutral distribution.Thus it is more flexible and accurate to capture the dynamics of the underlying stock return process and keep the rich set of real-world convertible bond specifications compared with previous model-driven models.The experiments on the Chinese convertible bond market demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepPricing model.Compared with the convertible bond market prices,our model has a better convertible bonds pricing performance than both model-driven models,i.e.Black-Scholes,the constant elasticity of variance,GARCH,and the state-of-the-art GAN-based models,i.e.FinGAN-MLP,FinGAN-LSTM.Moreover,our model has a better fitting capacity for higher-volatility convertible bonds and the overall convertible bond market implied volatility smirk,especially for equity-liked convertible bonds,convertible bonds trading in the bull market,and out-of-the-money convertible bonds.Furthermore,the Long-Short and Long-Only investment strategies based on our model earn a significant annualized return with 41.16%and 31.06%,respectively,for the equally-weighted portfolio during the sample period.

Trading stocks following sharp movements in the USDX, GBP/USD, and USD/CNY

We hypothesized that sharp movement in the USDX,GBP/USD,and USD/CNY might result in stock market fluctuations owing to heightened investors’sentiments.The subsequent performance of trading stocks right after such sharp movements in exchange rates is seldom explored in existing studies.We examined the historical data of the constituent stocks of the DJ 30,FTSE 100,and SSE 50 indexes and found that the share prices were more volatile after sharp movements in the CNY,even though the currency is less volatile because of China’s exchange rate policy.However,for the USD and GBP,share prices of the DJ 30 and FTSE 100,respectively,rose after sharp appreciation and depreciation of the currencies.

ZA PLSs＇ Performance and Black Swan Approach

The empirical study uses black swan approach to analyze the performance of South African （ZA） listed property loan stocks （PLSs）. Although there are no empirical studies on black swan perspective and performance of listed real estate funds, the study found that there are similar traits of investing in listed real estate funds from emerging markets＇ perspective and what black swan advocates such as passive investment strategy and non-normality distribution of returns from listed real estate funds. Furthermore, the individual return of each fund was higher the return of the property loan stocks index and the probabilities of all variables confirm that they （variables） are significant when alpha is 10% at confidence level of 90%.

Optimal Investment Problem for an Insurer and a Reinsurer

This paper studies the optimal investment problem for an insurer and a reinsurer. The basic claim process is assumed to follow a Brownian motion with drift and the insurer can purchase proportional reinsurance from the reinsurer. The insurer and the reinsurer are allowed to invest in a risk-free asset and a risky asset. Moreover, the authors consider the correlation between the claim process and the price process of the risky asset. The authors first study the optimization problem of maximizing the expected exponential utility of terminal wealth for the insurer. Then with the optimal reinsurance strategy chosen by the insurer, the authors consider two optimization problems for the reinsurer： The problem of maximizing the expected exponential utility of terminal wealth and the problem of minimizing the ruin probability. By solving the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations, the authors derive the optimal reinsurance and investment strategies, explicitly. Finally, the authors illustrate the equality of the reinsurer＇s optimal investment strategies under the two cases.

Time-Consistent Investment Strategy for DC Pension Plan with Stochastic Salary Under CEV Model

This paper aims to derive the time-consistent investment strategy for the defined contribution(DC) pension plan under the mean-variance criterion.The financial market consists of a risk-free asset and a risky asset of which price process satisfies the constant elasticity of variance(CEV) model.Compared with the geometric Brownian motion model,the CEV model has the ability of capturing the implied volatility skew and explaining the volatility smile.The authors assume that the contribution to the pension fund is a constant proportion of the pension member's salary.Meanwhile,the salary is stochastic and its volatility arises from the price process of the risky asset,which makes the proposed model different from most of existing researches and more realistic.In the proposed model,the optimization problem can be decomposed into two sub-problems:Before and after retirement cases.By applying a game theoretic framework and solving extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman(HJB) systems,the authors derive the time-consistent strategies and the corresponding value functions explicitly.Finally,numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effects of model parameters on the time-consistent strategies.

Ruin probability of the renewal model with risky investment and large claims

The ruin probability of the renewal risk model with investment strategy for a capital market index is investigated in this paper.For claim sizes with common distribution of extended regular variation,we study the asymptotic behaviour of the ruin probability.As a corollary,we establish a simple asymptotic formula for the ruin probability for the case of Pareto-like claims.

Optimal Investment Strategy of Defined Contribution Pension Based on Bequest Motivation and Loss Aversion

Under the S-shaped utility of loss aversion,this paper considers the bequest motivation of pension plan participants,random salary income before retirement and the substitution rate between receiving pension benefits after retirement and wages before retirement,and studies the optimal investment strategy of defined contribution(DC)pension.Assuming that pension funds can invest in a financial market consisting of three assets(risk-free asset cash,rolling bonds and stocks),inflation is considered by discount.Under the S-shaped utility,the Lagrange method is used to find the terminal optimal surplus of pensions in retirement,so as to find the terminal optimal wealth,and then the martingale method is used to find the optimal wealth process and investment strategy.Finally,a sensitivity analysis is carried out on the the influence of bequest motivation and loss aversion on the optimal investment strategy of DC pension.

R & D STRATEGIC INVESTMENT IN AN ASYMMETRICAL CASE

This article analyzes R ＆ D investment decisions in an asymmetrical case. The investment decisions share three important characteristics. First, the investment is completely irreversible. Second, there are two kinds of uncertainties over the future returns from the investment and over technology in R ＆ D process, respectively. Third, there is strategic competition in the asymmetrical case. This article presents the optimal investment threshold values and the optimal investment rule of high-efficient firm （leader）, and shows that the investment threshold values are reduced by competition of two firms. Finally, the mixed investment strategies for two firms, the probability that each firm separately exercises the option to invest, and the probability that two firms simultaneously exercise the option are given in the paper.

The Ruin Probability in the Presence of Extended Regular Variation and Optimal Investment

Considering the classical model with risky investment, we are interested in the ruin probability that is minimized by a suitably chosen investment strategy for a capital market index. For claim sizes with common distribution of extended regular variation, starting from an integro-differential equation for the maximal survival probability, we find that the corresponding ruin probability as a function of the initial surplus is also extended regular variation.

Profit Guided or Statistical Error Guided? A Study of Stock Index Forecasting Using Support Vector Regression

Stock index forecasting has been one of the most widely investigated topics in the field of financial forecasting. Related studies typically advocate for tuning the parameters of forecasting models by minimizing learning errors measured using statistical metrics such as the mean squared error or mean absolute percentage error. The authors argue that statistical metrics used to guide parameter tuning of forecasting models may not be meaningful, given the fact that the ultimate goal of forecasting is to facilitate investment decisions with expected profits in the future. The authors therefore introduce the Sharpe ratio into the process of model building and take it as the profit metric to guide parameter tuning rather than using the commonly adopted statistical metrics. The authors consider three widely used trading strategies, which include a na¨?ve strategy, a filter strategy and a dual moving average strategy, as investment scenarios. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed profit guided approach, the authors carry out simulation experiments using three global mainstream stock market indices. The results show that profit guided forecasting models are competitive, and in many cases produce significantly better performances than statistical error guided models. This implies thatprofit guided stock index forecasting is a worthwhile alternative over traditional stock index forecasting practices.