Abuse of Municipal Finance in Wisconsin
(Mar 2012)
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Stifel Financial has settled with five Wisconsin school districts on charges that they misled these municipal investors with their sale of several complex CDOs. This is just another example of the situation outlined in a previous postwherein a municipality or institutional investor was taken advantage of through the sale of inappropriate investments. The settlement involves $22.5 million in cash, plus $154 million in debt forgiveness. SLCG has been...
UK Financial Regulators Probe Interest Rate Swaps
(Mar 2012)
The Financial Times reported yesterday that the Financial Services Authority -- the counterpart of the SEC in the UK -- will investigate the possible mis-selling of interest rate swaps by banks, including Barclays. The regulator decided to look into the issue after The Telegraph provided detailed information about the potential misconduct of banks when selling interest rate swaps to small businesses.
In one of its reports, the Telegraph details a situation in which a manufacturing company...
SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review (Part I) - March 16th, 2012
(Mar 2012)
Due to the high volume of litigation releases from the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past week, we're spreading this week's review over two posts. This is the first of the two posts.
SEC Files Civil Injunctive Action Against Senior Management of Thornburg Mortgage, Inc. for Alleged Fraudulent Overstatement of Thornburg's Income
March 13, 2012, (Litigation Release No. 22287)
Ealier this week, the SEC charged that Larry Goldstone, Clarence Simmons and Jane Starrett (former...
SPIVA Scorecard Year-End 2011
(Mar 2012)
S&P recently released their semiannual report comparing the performance of actively managed mutual funds against their appropriate benchmark indices. The S&P Indices Versus Active Funds (SPIVA) Scorecard contains information the mutual fund industry would likely prefer to be kept quiet.
The Year-End 2011 SPIVA Scorecard reports that "over a five-year horizon[...] a majority of active equity and bond managers in most categories lag comparable benchmark indices." Actively managed mutual funds...
Greg Smith Leaves Wall Street
(Mar 2012)
The New York Times published an op-ed by Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs' Executive Director who is resigning from his job after almost 12 years with the firm because, as he puts it, the firm's culture has veered far from what it was when he first joined the firm. He says in spite of the firm's recent scandals "the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money." At SLCG, we have come across many examples of the issues raised by Mr....
SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - March 9th, 2012
(Mar 2012)
District Judge Approves SEC Settlement with Koss Corporation and Michael J. Koss, its former CEO and CFO
March 9, 2012, (Litigation Release No. 22279)
In the SEC's October 2011 complaint(Litigation Release No. 22138), the SEC alleged that the Milwaukee, Wisconsin based Koss Corporation had prepared materially inaccurate financial statements from FY 2005-2009. The complaint alleged that, during this period, Sujata Sachdeva (Koss Corporation's former Principal Accounting Officer and Vice...
SLCG Research: Non-Traded REITs
(Mar 2012)
We've posted a new working paper on our website that brings together much of our research related to non-traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). In it, we discuss the history and structure of non-traded REITs as well as differences between non-traded REITs and other avenues for gaining exposure to real estate. We highlight the dizzying array of fees and conflicts of interest embedded in these companies. We demonstrate that non-traded REITs are often misleadingly valued, heavily...
Hedge Fund Correlation with Broad-Based Indexes Increases Dramatically
(Mar 2012)
As Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Research's Mary Ann Bartels showed last year, the correlation of hedge fund monthly returns with broad based stock market indexes has recently hit historic highs. We decided to look into this phenomenon and determine whether or not it is persisting.
In the following plot, we show the monthly returns for the S&P 500 index as well as the Dow Jones Credit Suisse Core Hedge Fund Index (representing an aggregation of several hedge fund investment...
WSJ on Innovation in Commodity ETFs
(Mar 2012)
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an article about recent innovation in the commodity ETF space. Our work on commodity ETFs has focused on their use of constant-maturity rolling futures strategies, which incur a roll yield depending on conditions in the futures markets. Now, according to the WSJ, many ETF issuers are choosing more complex strategies to try to mitigate these and other effects in commodities markets:
Some of these new products use complex formulas to identify commodities...
Downloading Price Quotes from Yahoo! Finance: an Excel-Based Tool
(Mar 2012)
Yahoo! Finance is a useful tool to get the latest quotes on various financial products. Although it is very convenient to see the price movement of the security of your interest (for example, IBM Stock) on Yahoo! Finance, it is somewhat more difficult to download the data into your own Excel spread sheet.
We recently designed an Excel template which allows users to directly download price data from Yahoo! Finance. You can download the tool from our website. To use the tool, simply call the...
