The Efficient Market Theory and Evidence


Book Description

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that, at all times, the price of a security reflects all available information about its fundamental value. The implication of the EMH for investors is that, to the extent that speculative trading is costly, speculation must be a loser's game. Hence, under the EMH, a passive strategy is bound eventually to beat a strategy that uses active management, where active management is characterized as trading that seeks to exploit mispriced assets relative to a risk-adjusted benchmark. The EMH has been refined over the past several decades to reflect the realism of the marketplace, including costly information, transactions costs, financing, agency costs, and other real-world frictions. The most recent expressions of the EMH thus allow a role for arbitrageurs in the market who may profit from their comparative advantages. These advantages may include specialized knowledge, lower trading costs, low management fees or agency costs, and a financing structure that allows the arbitrageur to undertake trades with long verification periods. The actions of these arbitrageurs cause liquid securities markets to be generally fairly efficient with respect to information, despite some notable anomalies.




Economists and the Stock Market


Book Description

The recent global financial crisis and role of the stock market led to many questioning how the international financial system operates. The authors of this book offer insights into these issues, contrasting speculative explanations with the efficient markets hypothesis.




Informational Efficiency in Speculative Markets


Book Description

The purpose of this work is to provide a critical presentation and some extensions of two perspectives of informational efficiency: On the one hand the neoclassical perspective or «arithmomorphic approach» explains efficiency in terms of a concept mainly based on an explicit economic theory. On the other hand, in the Austrian perspective or «causal genetic approach» attention is drawn to the entrepreneurial element of human decision making related to an arbitrage theory of profit which is not traced back to anonymous market forces but rather to incessant discovery of information guided by entrepreneurial alertness.




The "Speculative Efficiency" Hypothesis


Book Description

The hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets. This paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact, the term quot;speculative efficiencyquot; is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis. If a market is subject to efficient speculation, the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price. The expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model. Although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market, the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets.




The Art Of Speculation


Book Description

Philip L. Carret (1896-1998) was a famed investor and founder of The Pioneer Fund (Fidelity Mutual Trust), one of the first Mutual Funds in the United States. A former Barron’s reporter and WWI aviator, Carret launched the Mutual Trust in 1928 after managing money for his friends and family. The initial effort evolved into Pioneer Investments. He ran the fund for 55 years, during which an investment of $10,000 became $8 million. Warren Buffett said of him that he had “the best long term investment record of anyone I know” He is most famous for the long successful track record he achieved investing in Common Stocks and for being one of Warren Buffett’s role models. This book comprises a series of articles written for Barron’s and published in book form in 1930.—Print Ed.







We're Talking Millions!


Book Description

Understanding how to invest wisely for your future can be daunting. Many people never get started for fear of making mistakes. Others make choices based on hearsay and hope, sold on hype or risk aversion. In "We're Talking Millions!" you will learn why and how to make a handful of smart choices that can turn modest regular savings into a secure future. You'll discover "12 Small Steps with Big Payoffs," each of which can add $1 million or more to your retirement nest egg if you start in your 20s or 30s. These steps are well known. Now for the first time, "We're Talking Millions!" combines them into a single action plan you can implement in less than one hour a year. That could be the most valuable time you'll ever spend. Get started now!Long-time financial educator/retired advisor Paul Merriman and co-author Richard Buck have boiled down decades of academic-based knowledge and experience to help Millennials and Gen Y'ers get started and stay on the right track of saving and investing for life using 401ks, IRAs and other simple investments like target date funds. "This is an exciting new fact based investment approach, coming from authors who have earned the trust and respect of a couple of generations of investors. I wish I had had this knowledge when I was in my 20s." - Larry Swedroe, Director of Research at Buckingham Family of Financial Services and author of "Your Complete Guide to a Successful and Secure Retirement" "There is beauty in simplicity and in this new book, We're Talking Millions! 12 Ways to Supercharge Your Retirement. Paul Merriman and Rich Buck have taken the complex world of investing and distilled it down to core principles that both novice and experienced investors alike will benefit from." - Tim Ranzetta, co-founder Next Gen Personal Finance (ngpf.org) "The combination of financial literacy and discipline is so rare these days that it should be considered a superpower. This book provides a shortcut to obtaining both!" - James M. Dahle, MD, Founder of The White Coat InvestorI have always said that investing is too easy to seem so complex. Paul Merriman and Rich Buck have managed to prove that point in this powerful and easily understood guide to building wealth. Their approach is so straightforward and simple that anyone can build a sensible, science-based portfolio almost immediately. Follow this advice and you could be "talking millions" in your pocket. -Don McDonald, co-host "Talking Real Money", author "Financial Fysics""Whether millennial or boomer, understanding these 12 concepts can have a big financial payoff... We're Talking Millions! Paul Merriman and Richard Buck team up again to educate and motivate." - David Baughier, curator of Fiology"Paul and Richard reduce the complexity of saving for retirement into strategies anyone can follow. Regardless if you are new to investing or have been investing for years, you'll find suggestions for boosting your wealth with minimal effort required." - Charles Rotblut, CFA, AAII Journal Editor and VP, American Association of Individual Investors"Merriman and Buck have done a great job of giving a playbook for financial success that anyone can read and understand!" - George Grombacher, Host of the Money Savage podcast"We're Talking Millions! could be a young person's Most Valuable Read (MVR) of their life, if they take action!" - Ed Fulbright, CPA, PFS, Host of Masteringyourmoney.com"Paul & Rich have done it again! For the last few decades they have shown investors how to create long-term portfolios for retirement, how to generate retirement income, and how to avoid costly mistakes. In their new book, We're Talking Millions! 12 Ways to Supercharge Your Retirement, they help people of all ages with huge money decisions. Written in plain English with critical charts, this book will help anyone who wants to create wealth in simple, low cost ways." - Tom Cock, co-host "Talking Real Money"




The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Market Speculation and Corporate Governance


Book Description

This work considers how imperfect or misleading market information opens the door to speculation and distortion of economic choice, and how government sets the rules by which the financial world plays. It calls for policy changes to rationalize savings and investment decisions, promote long-term planning over speculation, encourage institutional investors to take a more active role in corporate governance, and disseminate more information to investors. Shiller's paper examines the economic basis of financial speculation and the intrinsic worth of measures proposed to rein in speculators or to limit the damage caused when their activity gets out of hand.