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

Displaying 381-390 out of 709 results

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - March 15th, 2013

(Mar 2013)

Court Orders Former Prudential Securities Broker to Pay Over $763,000 Related to Deceptive Mutual Fund Market Timing Practices
March 13, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22643)
A final judgment was entered against Frederick J. O'Meally, a former registered representative of broker-dealer Prudential Securities Inc, for allegedly using "deceptive practices to evade blocks by mutual fund companies on his market timing trading." The judgment orders O'Meally to pay over $763,000 in disgorgement,...

More Trouble for Inland American Real Estate Trust

(Mar 2013)

Inland American's March 2012 quarterly report revealed that the company was the subject of an ongoing SEC investigation (we wrote about this in our blog post titled "SEC Investigation into Largest Non-Traded REIT May Be A Sign of Things To Come"). Inland American's 2012 annual report further disclosed that several stockholders have sued the company seeking recovery of damages (View the SEC filing). According to the information in Inland American's SEC filings, both the SEC investigation and...

Private Equity Fund Advisers Charged with Misleading Investors about Valuation and Performance

(Mar 2013)

Earlier this week, the SEC charged Oppenheimer Asset Management (OAM) and Oppenheimer Alternative Investment Management (OAIM) with misrepresenting the performance of the Oppenheimer Global Resource Private Equity Fund I L.P. (OGR) in their marketing materials. The SEC found that OGR's manager used his own valuation methodology to value the fund's largest investment, Cartesian Investors-A LLC ("Cartesian"), at a significant markup. This inflated valuation led to a ten-fold increase in OGR's...

SEC Charges the State of Illinois for Misleading Pension Disclosures

(Mar 2013)

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the State of Illinois with misleading municipal bond investors by making inaccurate or incomplete statements concerning their statutory plan to fund the state's pension obligations. In particular, the "SEC investigation revealed that Illinois failed to inform investors about the impact of problems with its pension funding schedule as the state offered and sold more than $2.2 billion worth of municipal bonds from 2005 to early...

Persistence and Mean Reversion in VIX Rolling Futures Indexes

(Mar 2013)

In our last post we followed up on Jason Voss's discussion of the Hurst exponent as a measure of persistence or mean reversion in market data. We compared the Hurst exponents of the S&P 500 to that of the VIX index, and found that the S&P 500 is largely a random signal (Hurst exponent near 0.5) but that the VIX exhibits characteristics of a 'switching' or mean reverting signal (a Hurst exponent between 0 and 0.5).

Much has been made of VIX mean reversion in the financial blogosphere. One idea...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - March 8th, 2013

(Mar 2013)

SEC Charges Robert Crane for Market Manipulation
March 7, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22636)
According to the complaint (opens to PDF), in 2010 Robert Crane manipulated the market of two penny stocks: Argentex Mining Corporation and ERHC Energy Inc. The complaint charges Crane with violating sections of the Securities Act and Exchange Act. A court order was entered against him that permanently enjoins him from future violations of those laws and also imposes a penny stock bar against...

Persistence and Mean Reversion in Market Data

(Mar 2013)

Jason Voss at the CFA Institute has recently written a very interesting series of posts on the Hurst exponent, which is "a method for detecting persistence, randomness, or mean reversion in financial markets." The Hurst exponent measures the degree to which a signal depends on previous values--a phenomenon known as autocorrelation--and specifically whether values tend to 'switch' (e.g., high values followed by low values) or 'persist' (e.g., high values followed by other high values). Jason...

SEC Litigation Releases: Week in Review - March 1st, 2013

(Mar 2013)

Defendant Adam S. Rosengard Settles SEC Charges in Penny Stock Manipulation Case
February 27, 2013, (Litigation Release No. 22626)
A final judgment was entered this Monday against Adam S. Rosengard for his alleged involvement in a stock manipulation scheme. According to the SEC's original complaint, Pawel P. Dynkowski and other defendants manipulated the price of Xtreme Motorsports of California, Inc.'s stock through "wash sales, matched orders and other manipulative trading." Rosengard then...

Evolution of Absolute Return Structured Products

(Feb 2013)

From 2006 to 2009, a type of structured product known as an absolute return barrier note (ARBN) was issued by a variety of major investment banks. ARBNs are interesting because they are linked to the absolute value of the return on an underlying, not just its return, and therefore are considered non-directional bets. We've done a lot of work on ARBNs here at SLCG, including a research paper that values a sample of ARBNs and finds they are worth on average 4.5% less than their purchase price...

SEC Issues Letter Regarding Structured Product Valuation Disclosures

(Feb 2013)

Bloomberg's Kevin Dugan is reporting that the SEC has issued a letter to issuers of structured products late last week that offers guidance for the disclosures of estimated value in offering documents. The SEC letter addresses the concerns we and others have shared over the potential mispricing of structured products, which can be and are sold to retail investors -- you can read through our research papers on the topic.

The letter confirms that the SEC will require--though it is not clear...

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