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Showing posts from December, 2008

Happy New Year

I get to close out 2008 on hospital room duty with my son. He's doing well - had his breathing tube out yesterday, is eating regular food, and slowly recuperating. He should be moved out of the ICU tomorrow and into a regular room. With some luck, he might be home by Monday the 5 th . The Unknown Wife and Daughter are going to a neighbor's house for a little New Year's cheer (the non-alcoholic kind, since Unknown Wife is expecting), and then home by about 10. Here's hoping 2009 finds you healthy, prosperous, and happy.

Paddy Hirsch Explains Quantitative Easing

Yet another excellent whiteboard talk by Paddy Hirsch, senior editor at Marketplace. In this one, he explains "Quantitative Easing" Quantitative easing from Marketplace on Vimeo .

How Do You Use Credit Default Swaps (CDS) To Create "Synthetic Debt"?

There's been a lot of talk in recent months about "synthetic debt". I just read a pretty good explanation of synthetics in Felix Salmon's column, so I thought I'd give a brief summary of what it is, how it's used, and why. First off, let's start with Credit Default Swaps (CDS). A CDS has a lot of similarities to an insurance policy on a bond (it's different in that the holder of the CDS needn't own the underlying bond or even suffer a loss if the bond goes into default). The buyer (holder) of a CDS will make yearly payments (called the "premium"), which is stated in terms of basis points (a basis point is 1/100 of one percent of the notional amount of the underlying bond). The holder of the CDS gets paid if the bond underlying the CDS goes into default or if other stated events occur (like bankruptcy or a restructuring). So, how do you use a CDS to create a synthetic bond? here's the example from Salmon's column: Let's a

Bad News

We just got som bad news regarding the Unknown Son. As many of my regular readers already know, he's gone through a lot - he's a two-times cancer survivor. In 2002 he was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma , a particularly nasty and resistant childhood cancer. After a great deal of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, more chemotherapy, and experimental treatments (including an autologous (i.e. "self") stem-cell transplant, he went into remission in 2005. In January of 2008, he was diagnosed with a Wilms ' tumor (a kidney tumor), which resulted in the removal of his right kidney and, after more chemo, he was given another clean bill of health this summer. Now it looks like he has another tumor - in the lower part of his right lung. We just found out about it two days ago as a result of routing follow-up scans. He's scheduled for more surgery this coming Monday (the 29th). He'll get the tumor removed, which will give us the best information as to what exac

Window Dressing and Other Mutual Fund Games

What do the following terms have in common? Window Dressing Painting The Tape/Banging The Close Comparison Shopping The answer is that they're all games that mutual fund managers play at the end of the year to make their portfolios' performance look better. The Investing section of today's Wall Street Journal has a short piece that describes these games: Window dressing happens when the portfolio manager sells off securities just before the end of the reporting period so that they don't show up in the annual (or quarterly) listing o the portfolio's securities. Painting the Tape (also called Banging the Close) occurs when a portfolio manager holding a security buys a few additional shares right at the close of business at an inflated price. For example, if he held shares in XYZ Corp on the last day of the reporting period (and it's selling at, say $50), he might put in small orders at a higher price to inflate the the closing price (which is what's rep

President Bush and The Military

I try to keep politics mostly out of Financial Rounds because it generally gets people far too worked up. Likewise, I try not to post too much about President Bush. But this piece in the Washington Post caught my eye. For much of the past seven years, President Bush and Vice Prresident Dick Cheney have waged a clandestine operation inside the For much of the past seven years, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney White House. It has involved thousands of military personnel, private presidential letters and meetings that were kept off their public calendars or sometimes left the news media in the dark. Their mission: to comfort the families of soldiers who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to lift the spirits of those wounded in the service of their country. Read the whole thing here. Regardless what else you think about President Bush, he clearly appreciates and honors the role the military plays and the sacrifices those soldie

Awesome Explanation of the Economic Crisis

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I didn't realize this, but every year Harvard's Kennedy School invites new members of congress for a three-day "briefing" by Harvard profs on various topics. This year, Jeff Frankel came up with a graphic explanation of the current economic crisis. Here it is: Now that's what I call an information-rich slide.

Want To See Your Favorite Hedge Fund's Holdings?

You can't see all their holdings. But you can see quite a bit. Section 13(f) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 requires all institutional fund managers with more than $100 million in assets to report their holdings each quarter to the SEC *(within 45 days of the end of the quarter). The hard copies of these filings go back 30 years, but they've been available for free online through the SEC's EDGAR database since 1999. The form name is (not surprisingly) "13F" or "13F-HR". Like many academics, I've used the electronic database of 13F filings put out by Thomson Financial (which has information back to the early 80s on electronic media, runs 5-10 gigabytes, and requires you to have some programming chops to access) in my research. But you can access a fund's data one filing at a time through the Edgar site. It won't show things like derivatives holdings (at least usually not) or short sales. But if will give you an interesting lo

When Worlds Collide: Spitzer Lost Money With Madoff

From Clusterstock.com: Elliott Spitzer Lost Money With Madoff: Add the name Eliot Spitzer to the list of prominent people allegedly ripped off by Wall Street trader Bernard L. Madoff. Yesterday at Slate 's holiday party Spitzer, who is writing a column for the online publication, confirmed that his family's firm had investments with a Madoff subsidiary. I love it when two stories intersect (however loosely). It sounds like the Seinfeld episode " The Pool Guy "when George's girlfriend Susan starts being friends with Elaine. HT: FinanceProfessor.com

The 12 Days of Global Warming

Whether you believe in global warming or not, this is pretty funny. At least I thought so. And besides--anything that makes fun of Al Gore is always worth a look just on general principles. Note: If you want to receive updates, either sign up for email on the right sidebar, or add our RSS feed to your feed reader.

It's All Done But The Grading (And The Bargaining)

I gave my last exam (to my MBA class) last night. I thought it was a pretty easy one, but as usual, there were three students (out of twenty eight) still working at the end of three hours' time. I've come to the realization that I could give four hours (or even five) for an exam, and there would STILL be a few people working to the bitter end. A few observations from the exam (none of them surprising): My favorite student got the Terry Pratchett/Discworld references sprinkled on the exam, and one of my others caught a couple of 1980s movie references. In between walking up and down the aisles, I wrote about a hundred lines of SAS code One of my students already has sent an email asking if we can meet "to discuss his grade." Anyone want to guess how that'll play out? Now all I have to do is grade them, set grades for the semester, and wait for the inevitable emails arguing for higher grades. Oh wait - I already got one of those...

Winner's (and Loser's) Curse with Swoopo.com

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Winner's curse is the well-known phenomenon where the winner of an auction is often just the person who's most likely to have overpaid for the item in question. So, often the winner is the loser. Then I heard about Swoopo.com . It's been called "pure distilled evil in a business plan". Here's their setup: Bidding for an item starts at $0.15 Each bid raises the price by $0.15 Bids cost $0.75 to make. Here's the kicker - a bid in the final seconds extends the auction for 15 seconds. So, auctions can go on and on. Of course, they post the "savings" you would receive if you bought the item at the current price as a prod for people to continue betting. They also hold "penny auctions" on their front page - a bid only increments the price by a penny. I recently saw a TomTom GPS sold for about $12. That means 1200 bids at $0.75 per bid, for revenue of $900, on something that costs them between $300 and $500. Not too shabby. This is a b

Some Links On Distressed Debt Investing

One of my students is interviewing soon for an internship in an investment bank's fixed income department, and another is going to be starting soon in a credit analyst position, So, these pieces on distressed debt investing were pretty timely. Michelle Harner over at the Conglomerate posted a very nice piece with some links about distressed debt investing. She highlights the difference between "vulture investing" and "investing for control" (basically traders vs. longer-term investors). She gives a couple of pretty good references. One, from Knowledge@QWharton lays out the basics of "distressed for control" investing: Simply put, their line of work is to make a profit from companies that have failed to do so and are on the brink of bankruptcy. Unlike traditional hedge funds, however, their investment doesn't stop at buying significant portions of these companies' debt for pennies on the dollar, tidying up the balance sheet and then selling

It's Final Exam Time

I give my last final exam of the semester tomorrow to my MBAs . Just for the heck of it, I named all the companies and individuals in the problems after characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. I wonder if anyone in the class will notice? If they do, I'll probably give them extra credit.

Bill Miller: The Stock Picker's Defeat

From 1991 to 2005, Bill Miller (superstar mutual fund manager for Legg Mason's Value Trust) beat the S&P every year - a record no other manager has ever come close to matching. Then, this last year the bottom fell out and his fund lost 58% (about 20% more than the typical fund. The Wall Street Journal has a great interview of Miller, and here's the best line: This meltdown has provided a lesson for Mr. Miller and other "value" investors: A stock may look tantalizingly cheap, but sometimes that's for good reason. It's a very good piece for discussing in class, since it touches on a lot of issues related to market efficiency. Read the whole thing here .

When Diversification Doesn't Work

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I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with correlation...

The Long-Run and International Evidence on the Value Premium

The term "Value Premium" refers to the empirical observation that firms with low price multiples (i.e Price/Book, Price/Earnings, Price/Cash Flow) have tended to have higher returns than their high-multiple counterparts - even after controlling for risk. People give a lot of possible reasons for this - we have a bad model for controlling for risk, there are behavioral biases, or it's simply a case of data diving. I just came across a paper by a group known as the Brandeis Institute titled "Value vs. Glamour: A Global Phenomenon" that seems to rule out the data diving story. They examine the evidence for the value premium both across time (the mid 1960's to the present) and internationally. They found that While the degree of outperformance of value stocks vs. glamour stocks varied across data sets, what strikes us as most significant was the consistency the value premium exhibited: across valuation metrics, such as price-to-book, price-to-cash flow, price

The Final Throes of the Semester

It's that time of the semester: Only one meeting left for each of my classes. My student-managed fund survive their end-of semester presentation to the advisory board I've graded and handed back all assignments except for final exams I've even given out and collected my evaluations Now all I have to do is make up my finals, give them, and grade them. The crop is almost in. And man, oh man is it about time. One of the things I like about this career is that it has a rhythm to it - we have new "crops" each semester, and a feeling of accomplishment once the semester is done. But that final week or two is always a bit crazy. So, to all my readers: If you're a student, good luck on your exams and projects. If you're faculty, hang in there - it's almost time for the break.

New Blog on Markets

Al Roth (the George Gund Professor of Economics at Harvard) is extremely well known in the fields of game theory and market design. For just a few examples, he's published highly cited work on the market for donor organs, matching medical students with residencies, and matching public school children with schools. He also Now he has a blog, titled (appropriately enough) Market Design . It's definitely worth a look-see. HT: Marginal Revolution

Credit Default Swaps and Arctic Expeditions

This weekend I posted a video of a "whiteboard" talk by Paddy Hirsch of Marketplace, in which he explains CDO s and the credit crisis. Here's another one where he explains Credit Default Swaps (CDS) using the analogy of an arctic expedition. Since I'm teaching Fixed Income next year, I'm sure some of these will make their way into my class.