The prices recently offered for Conoco and Marathon Oil clearly astounded many market observers. Where did these figures - 10, 20, 30 per cent over prevailing market values - come from? Had the managements of Dome Petroleum, Mobil, Du Pont et al. deserted their calculators for magic wands? Were...

Many investors occasionally receive what they believe to be nonpublic information about a security. Others feel that by applying superior analytical skills to public information, they are able to arrive at valuable insights that are not generally appreciated. In either case, there is a...

The principles of behavioral psychology can explain how crashes occur. In particular, the concept of "stimulus generalization" tells us that organisms tend to respond in the same way to similar stimuli. In a crash, or pre-crash, context, several stimuli - including rising prices, above-average...

Wherein it is shown how to make your company as large as desired and as large a portion of capitalization weighted stock indices as desired without doing anything useful, and how to borrow huge sums of money from banks with virtually no collateral, all within the confines of GAAP

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance...

Constructing a blockFrame chart as a graphical representation of a series of crypto asset price movements over block heights, - instead of time - where the basic graphical frame is one block, and the multipliers n blocks used for diverse graphical chart frames.blockFrame instead of timeframe...

In this note we present several thought experiments involving coin-flipping to illustrate the common tendency to over-weight past data in forecasting the future, particularly in the context of investment returns. We start by describing a survey we conducted of about 700 respondents involving the...

In this paper, we show that under a fairly innocuous assumption on price inefficiency, market capitalization weighted portfolios are sub-optimal. If market prices are more volatile than is warranted by changes in firm fundamentals, then cap-weighted portfolios do not capture the full premium...

A sound policy for spending wealth over time is as important as a sensible investment policy. It's a complex problem for taxable individuals with finite, uncertain longevity. A good start is thinking about the simpler problem of how one would spend if immortal. This is exactly the real problem...

In March 2020, government bond markets experienced severe illiquidity. Since then, regulators debate market reforms. One way to enhance liquidity could be to let government bonds, like stocks, be traded on central exchanges. We assess this reform with price data of the U.S, U.K., German,...