Financial economists writing about financial adverting often describe them as fluff at best and misleading or fraudulent at worst. This description typifies the first generation of behavioral finance that described people as irrational, misled by ads into cognitive and emotional errors. The...

Calibrating a trading rule using a historical simulation (also called backtest) contributes to backtest overfitting, which in turn leads to underperformance. We propose a procedure for determining the optimal trading rule (OTR) without running alternative model configurations through a backtest...

The majority of active Asian equity strategies claim to derive their value addition by focussing their skill on security selection. We investigate if empirically this is the most appropriate area for an active Asian manager to focus on, in comparison to focussing on asset allocation as the...

To increase understanding of the real world of the fund manager, the authors apply principles from emotional finance. They report their findings from analysing in-depth interviews of 52 traditional and quantitative-oriented equity managers. In particular, they examine the importance of...

With an ever-increasing amount of information related to the stock market or various investment avenues, misperception or no perception regarding mutual funds is becoming a norm for investors and marketers. To date no perception measuring scale has been developed for mutual fund investors, to...

On July 31, 2017, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced it would no longer add companies with multiple share classes to its flagship S&P 500 index. This decision was designed to protect index fund investors against unequal voting rights structures, but it has already lowered investors’ returns and...

Evidence is accumulating that in making investment decisions, many investors do not employ a 'rational expectations' approach in which they anticipate others' future behavior by analyzing their incentives and constraints. Rather, many investors rely on trust. Indeed, trust may be essential to a...

Using 1994-2009 data, we examine whether institutional investors are effective in evaluating analysts. All-American (AA) analysts elected by institutions through voting make buy and sell recommendations with up to 7% higher annualized risk-adjusted returns than other analysts. This performance...

Using 1994-2009 data, we document that All-American (AA) analysts' buy and sell recommendations outperform those of non-AAs by over 7% per annum after risk-adjustments. This performance differential exists both before and after AAs are elected, does not exhibit long-run reversal, and is not...