SLCG Research: Futures-Based Commodity ETFs
(Jan 2011)
SLCG released today a new study about Futures-Based Commodity ETFs. In the past decade the price of commodities has increased substantially and many investors have wanted to diversify their portfolios by including commodities. The most common way to invest in commodities is by buying futures contracts, which requires a good understanding of the pricing of futures contract and specific features of the futures market.
In the past few years we have seen many firms offer Commodity Exchange...
SLCG Research: Leveraged Municipal Bond Arbitrage
(Oct 2010)
SLCG released today 'Leveraged Municipal Bond Arbitrage: What Went Wrong?'. Leveraged municipal bond arbitrage is a strategy employed by fixed income hedge funds. This strategy buys long term municipal bonds and sells or shorts long term Treasury bonds while hedging with interest rate swaps. The strategy would seek to profit from the difference in the rates it receives from the municipal bonds and the rates it pays on the Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.
Brokers marketed hedge...
SLCG Research: Auction Rate Securities
(Oct 2010)
SLCG released today 'Auction Rate Securities'.
Auction rate securities were first issued in the mid-1980s by corporations. Over the next two decades ARS were issued widely by institutions ranging from closed-end mutual funds, municipalities to student loan trusts. ARS were long-term floating rate securities whose coupon payments were determined at auctions that were typically held every 7 to 35 days. ARS were long-term securities with short-term floating rates.
Broker dealers marketed...
SLCG Research: Leveraged ETFs
(Aug 2010)
SLCG released today 'Leveraged ETFs, Holding Periods and Investment Shortfalls'.
Exchange-Traded Funds is an investment fund that holds stocks, bonds, or commodities and typically tracks specific indices of such asset classes. Leveraged and inverse leveraged ETFs were first introduced to the market in June 2006 by ProFunds, which promiseds to return a multiple of the underlying index return by rebalancing their portfolios at the end of each day. The total market value of leveraged and...
SLCG Research: Mutual Fund's Term
(Apr 2010)
SLCG released today 'What Does a Mutual Fund's Term Tell Investors?'
Bond mutual funds are classified by Morningstar as ultra short, short, intermediate or long-term. Bond mutual funds have found a way to hold long-term bonds while being classified as ultra-short or short.
In this paper, we demonstrate how the losses suffered by these funds in 2008 can be explained by the increasing credit risks of holding long-term bonds. Furthermore, we find that the classification of these funds as...
SLCG Research: Charles Schwab YieldPlus
(Jul 2009)
SLCG released today 'Charles Schwab YieldPlus Risk'
This paper reports on the Charles Schwab YieldPlus, a bond fund. YieldPlus returned -31.7% between June 2007 and June 2008. Though it told investors that it was an ultra short bond fund, it was in fact an ultra long bond fund. It held securities backed by illiquid long-term private label mortgages, violating concentration and liquidity limits stated in its prospectus. Up until 2007, these securities helped YieldPlus generate...
SLCG Research: Abuse of Structured Finance
(Jan 2009)
SLCG released today 'Regions Morgan Keegan: The Abuse of Structured Finance'.
Six Regions Morgan Keegan (RMK) bond funds lost $2 billion in 2007. In the paper, we argue that the loss was not due to 'flight to quality' or 'mortgage meltdown' but to RMK's portfolio concentration in subordinated tranches of asset-backed securities.
We also find that RMK misrepresented to investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in several ways. Firstly, RMK did not disclose to the SEC...
SLCG Research: Collateralized Mortgage Obligations
(Jun 2007)
SLCG released today 'A CMO Primer: the law of Conservation of Structured Securities Risk'.
Recently, the finance industry witnessed the bailout of two Bears Sterns hedge funds and the collapse of Brookstreet Securities. Both had portfolio holdings of collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and suffered huge losses thereof. We have seen such CMO losses before, when in 1994 interest rates rose, CMOs fell in value and bond mutual funds suffered unexpected losses.
In this paper, Dr....
SLCG Research: Closed-end Fund IPOs
(Jun 2007)
SLCG released today 'Closed-end Fund IPOs'.
In this paper,
Dr. Edward O'Neal explains how closed-end funds trade at a discount to their net asset value (NAV). Dr O'Neal finds that at the initial public offering (IPO), a closed-end fund's offering price is set at its NAV. Yet during the year after the IPO, a closed-end fund's price drops as much as 5% from its offering price at the IPO. Furthermore, investors pay huge commissions on the sale of the closed-end fund, generating a premium...
