Countercyclical dispersion of firm outcomes (micro dispersion) is commonly used as a proxy for micro uncertainty. In this paper, we characterize conditions under which micro dispersion and micro uncertainty co-move positively in the context of a large Cournot economy with dispersed information...

Certification by online analysts and early investors can generate excitement among potential token investors, leading to successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). We test the general notion of "wisdom of crowds" using novel data on nearly 3,400 ICOs, including sequential investor subscriptions...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the ability of consensus prices to reduce valuation uncertainty in the over-the-counter market for financial derivatives. The analysis is based on a proprietary data set of price estimates for S&P500 index options provided by major broker-dealers to a...

Benjamin Franklin's original maxim found in Poor Richard's Almanac was actually "A penny saved is two pence clear" rather than the more commonly known "A penny saved is a penny earned." We believe he was getting at the notion that one risk-free penny is worth two pennies of expected but...

In a world of low rates and high stock prices, it's natural many investors are looking for ways to earn a good return with limited exposure to equities. However, many candidate strategies have return distributions which are significantly different from the Normal and Log-normal distributions...

We show theoretically that when Bayesian investors face time-series uncertainty about assets' risk exposures, differences in their priors affect the pricing of risk in the cross-section: different priors for the same asset can generate differences in perceived risk exposures, and thereby...

We find that an increase in the ``unusualness'' of news with negative sentiment predicts an increase in stock market volatility. Similarly, unusual positive news forecasts lower volatility. Our analysis is based on more than 360,000 articles on 50 large financial companies, published in...

Quarterly earnings conference calls convey fundamental information, as well as manager and analyst opinion about the firm. We examine how market uncertainty regarding firm valuation is affected by conference call tones. Using textual analysis of all publicly available earnings calls (2002-2012)...

We study investor communication and stock comovement using a novel dataset for an active online stock forum in China. We find substantial comovement among the returns of a stock and its “related stocks,” which are frequently discussed in the sub-forum dedicated to the given stock. Comovement...

Early in the 1950s, academics and investors started proposing in earnest a variety of summary statistics to capture in a single number the quality of an investment. Sharpe Ratio became the most commonly used, and it's an important metric, but maximizing Sharpe Ratio doesn't always maximize...