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

Displaying 561-570 out of 692 results

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...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - March 2nd, 2012

(Mar 2012)

Court Enters Summary Judgement Against Insider Trading Defendants John Jantzen and Wife, Marleen Jantzen
March 1, 2012, (Litigation Release No. 22273)
On Wednesday, United States District Judge James R. Nowlin of the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, entered summary judgment against Austin residents John and Marleen Jantzen on insider trading chargesbrought by the Commissionin 2010. The Court found that both Jantzens insider traded in violation of the Exchange Act based on material...

Time to Call for More Transparency in ETF Market

(Mar 2012)

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) started as a "plain vanilla" product: a type of low-fee, tax-efficient mutual funds holding index-mimicking portfolios. The first ETF was formed by the Toronto Stock Exchange in the 1980s and has garnered spectacular popularity in recent years. According to a recent article in The Economist, the number of ETFs in America has almost tripled from its 2006 level of 343 to 1,098 in December 2011. This volume increase has been accompanied by substantial financial...

More SEC Charges Coming Related to MBS Disclosures

(Feb 2012)

According to the Wall Street Journal today, several banks may soon face charges related to the disclosure of risks related to their sales of mortgage-backed-securities in 2006. The SEC is reportedly concerned about whether these banks "misled investors about the underlying pool of assets."

We have several posts lately and a research paper on similar disclosure issues for both collateralized loan obligations and mortgage-backed-securities, in which we describe how the warehousing of assets...

More Examples of CDO Warehousing and Potential Fraud

(Feb 2012)

Last month we had a blog post about Banc of America Securities selling investors CLOs which had already lost value before the CLO closing date. It seems that in July 2007 Banc of America transferred at least $35 million of previous losses to unsuspecting investors in two of its CLO offerings - LCM VII and Bryn Mawr II. In October 2008 when these two CLOs were liquidated investors lost nearly $150 million. But it is unlikely that these were the only structured deals that hid the true value of...

Mutual Fund Expense Analyzer: A Tool for Calculating Mutual Fund Fees and Expenses

(Feb 2012)

Every mutual fund investor should know how important fees and expenses are in determining the net return of his investment. Compared with other factors affecting a mutual fund's or an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF)'s return, such as market returns, fees and expenses are more stable over time and it is therefore easier to predict their effect on a fund's future performance. However, comparing fees and expenses across funds can be tedious and confusing, as different funds can use different fee...

WSJ: Private-Equity Fund in Valuation Inquiry

(Feb 2012)

There is an article in the Wall Street Journal today concerning the alleged exaggeration of an asset's value in a private-equity fund. From the article:

The potential exaggeration in the [Oppenheimer Global Resource Private Equity Fund LP] grew to more than $4 million, according to documents shared with Oppenheimer investors. The bulk of this markup came as the fund was reaching out to potential investors in the fall of 2009, and helped push the fund's reported internal rate of return to 38%,...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - February 24th, 2012

(Feb 2012)

Federal Court Enters Order Imposing $2.5 Million Civil Penalty Against Investment Adviser Robert Glenn Bard and Vision Specialist Group, LLC.
February 23, 2012, (Litigation Release No. 22267)
In July 2009 (Litigation Release No. 21160), the SEC stopped a fraud allegedly being perpetrated by Robert Glen Bard and his firm (Vision Specialist Group, LLC.). According to the SEC, Bard targeted residents of small rural communities promising high yields on relatively safe investments (such as CDs or...

Credit Risk in the Municipal Bond Marketplace

(Feb 2012)

Municipal bonds are debt securities issued by city, county or special-purpose government units (known as municipal authorities). This debt is typically issued to fund public works projects such as health care, construction projects or education. Because the interest from municipal bonds is usually exempt from federal income tax (one notable exception is Build America Bonds); the municipal bonds are especially attractive to high tax-bracket individuals. We will discuss some specifics of the...

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