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Our experts frequently write blog posts about the findings of the research we are conducting.

Displaying 131-140 out of 160 results for "Short".

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...

Did ARS Interest Payments Adequately Compensate Investors After the Failures?

(Feb 2012)

Auction Rate Securities (ARS) are floating interest rate debt issued primarily by municipalities, mutual funds, and special purpose trusts. ARS were marketed as short-term, cash-equivalent investments similar to commercial paper but any similarities with short-term investments were superficial and misleading. ARS are long-term debt traded in periodic auctions with prices fixed at par. The auction-determined interest rate was constrained by a maximum rate which could prevent the auctions from...

Should You Cash Out Your Home Equity to Find Your Missed Fortune? Careful! A Scam Might Be On the Way

(Feb 2012)

As a result of a lifetime of thrift, many homeowners find themselves in their 50s and 60s with considerable equity in their homes. Some investment advisors and insurance salesmen have been recommending that these homeowners refinance their mortgages to take the equity out of their homes - sometime called "equity harvesting" - to purchase high cost insurance contracts or investments. Whether insurance contracts or high cost investments are being pitched, the advisors and brokers get a big pay...

Reserve your Clever ETF Ticker Before it's Too Late

(Feb 2012)

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that descriptive and catchy tickers for Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are getting harder and harder to come by these days. From the article:

But finding a catchy symbol can be tough these days. Many have already been taken: 1,350 symbols are in use on the NYSE Arca alone, the biggest U.S. market for exchange-traded products. That's up 108% over the past five years, says Ms. Morrison. In addition, fund firms have reserved 2,446 symbols for future...

SLCG Research: Reverse Convertibles and Stochastic Volatility

(Feb 2012)

We've talked a lot about structured products -- and reverse convertibles in particular -- on this blog. In this blog post we discuss reverse convertibles in more detail and present some results found in a new research paper my colleagues and I have just completed.

Reverse convertible notes -- or simply "reverse convertibles" -- are structured products whose payoff at maturity is dependent upon the return of an underlying asset or security during the tenor of the note. If the underlying asset...

Oppenheimer Ordered to Repurchase $5.98 Million in Auction Rate Securities

(Jan 2012)

In January 2012, a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel in New York ordered Oppenheimer to repurchase certain Auction Rate Securities sold to Claimant Nicole Davi Perry for $5.98 million, plus payment of $134,108 in legal fees. The award was posted in FINRA's arbitration database this Monday. See this related report from Reuters. Dr. O'Neal at SLCG testified on behalf of the Claimant; Dr. O'Neal and Dr. McCann have authored a report on ARS previously.

Auction rate...

President and CIO of Direxion admits that leveraged ETFs are not appropriate for most investors

(Jan 2012)

Today Seeking Alpha posted an interview with Dan O'Neill, President and CIO of Direxion, one of the first and best known issuers of leveraged ETFs. Readers familiar with our work on leveraged ETFs know that we feel these products are almost always unsuitable for retail investors.

Surprisingly enough, Mr. O'Neill agrees completely:

The leveraged indexed ETFs are used by very tactical investors, and so there we have bull and bear funds. They have daily betas, which means that essentially...

Interest Rate Swaps

(Jan 2012)

In this blog post, we will discuss a particular kind of over-the-counter (OTC) derivative instrument called interest rate swaps. This post is meant as a broad stroke and an introduction to interest rate swaps. In the future, we plan to have additional posts about specialized interest rate swaps, case studies of particular interest rate swaps and on the pricing of interest rate swaps.

Interest rate swaps are customizable bilateral (involving two parties) agreements wherein one party exchanges...

Inverse ETFs

(Jan 2012)

Inverse exchange traded funds (ETFs) are, by most measures, just as popular and liquid as their leveraged counterparts. In this post we discuss the rebalancing and tracking behavior of these ETFs.

This is the second part of our two part series. Last time we discussed leveraged Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In this post, we are going to discuss a related kind of ETF: Inverse ETFs.

An Inverse ETF offers investors a daily return that is opposite of the daily return of the index or asset...

SEC Press Release: New Short Form Criteria

(Jul 2011)

SEC Adopts New Short Form Criteria to Replace Credit Ratings

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a press release today announcing that it had removed "credit ratings as eligibility criteria for companies seeking to use 'short form' registration when registering securities for public sale." The SEC unanimously voted for the adoption of this new rule, in response to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that encouraged financial regulators to rely...

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