A study of one brokerage house's recommendations to its individual customers during the 1960s suggests that they were genuinely valuable, even after allowing for transactions costs and risk. On the other hand, the recommendations were useful in selection, rather than in market timing: The ratio...

We investigate the importance of bid-ask spread induced biases on event date returns as exemplified by seasoned equity offerings by NYSE listed firms. We document significant negative return biases on the offering day which explain a large portion of the negative event date return documented in...

This paper shall consider not only the potential for individual investors to exploit one of the major categories of professional investment advice to earn superior portfolio returns, but also will examine the actual return experiences of a representative sample of investors who were, in fact,...