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Spanish Abstract: VERAVAL S.A. emitió en noviembre de 2010 un documento titulado: “Electricidad Abundante, ELECTRABUN. Valoración de acciones” Según este documento, el valor de las acciones de ELECTRABUN el 30 de abril de 2010 era 4.858 miles de US$. La valoración fue encargada a VERAVAL S.A. (una empresa especializada independiente) en mayo de 2010 por unos inversores que tenían mucho interés en formar parte del accionariado de ELECTRABUN. ELECTRABUN es una empresa eléctrica situada en un país emergente y según VERAVAL S.A. tiene unas estupendas expectativas de negocio. Este caso contiene toda la información numérica que VERAVAL S.A. entregó a los actuales accionistas de ELECTRABUN para justificar su valoración. Termina con 3 preguntas: 1. ¿Contiene algún error la “Valoración VERAVAL”? 2. ¿Modificarías algo de la “Valoración VERAVAL”? 3. ¿Cuál es tu valoración de las acciones de ELECTRABUN, según las expectativas de VERAVAL S.A.? English Abstract: The document presents the valuation of the shares of an electric company in an emerging country. It permits the reader to identify errors and recalculate the valuation.

We improve on our Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA) by the introduction of a separate “canary” universe for signaling the need for crash protection, using the concept of breadth momentum. The amount of cash is now governed by the number of canary assets with bad (non-positive) momentum. The risky part is still based on relative momentum (or relative strength), just like VAA. We call this strategy Defensive Assets Allocation (DAA). The aim of DAA is to lower the average cash (or bond) fraction while keeping nearly the same degree of crash protection as with VAA. Using a very simple model from Dec 1926 to Dec 1970 with only the SP500 index as risky asset, we find an optimal canary universe of VWO and BND (aka EEM and AGG), which turns out to be rather effective also for nearly all our VAA universes, from Dec 1970 to Mar 2018. The average cash fraction of DAA is often less than half that of VAA’s, while return and risk are similar and for recent years even better. The usage of a separate “canary” universe for signaling the need for crash protection also improves the tracking error with respect to the passive (buy-and-hold) benchmark and limits turnover.

We use a comprehensive new dataset of asset-class returns in 38 developed countries to examine a popular class of retirement spending rules that prescribe annual withdrawals as a constant percentage of the retirement account balance. A 65-year-old couple willing to bear a 5% chance of financial ruin can withdraw just 2.26% per year, a rate materially lower than conventional advice (e.g., the 4% rule). Our estimates of failure rates under conventional withdrawal policies have important implications for individuals (e.g., savings rates, retirement timing, and retirement consumption), public policy (e.g., participation rates in means-tested programs), and society (e.g., elderly poverty rates).

We evaluate the academic research on mutual fund performance in the US and UK concentrating particularly on the literature published over the last 20 years where innovation and data advances have been most marked. The evidence suggests that ex-post, there are around 2-5% of top performing UK and US equity mutual funds which genuinely outperform their benchmarks whereas around 20-40% of funds have genuinely poor. Key drivers of relative performance are, load fees, expenses and turnover. There is little evidence of successful market timing. Evidence on picking winners suggests past winner funds persist, particularly when rebalancing is frequent (i.e., less than one year) - but transactions costs and fund fees imply that economic gains to investors from actively switching into winner funds may be marginal. However, recent research using more sophisticated sorting rules (e.g., Bayesian approaches) indicate possible large gains from picking winners, when rebalancing monthly. The evidence also clearly supports the view that past loser funds remain losers. Broadly speaking results for bond mutual funds are similar to those for equity mutual funds but hedge funds show better ex-post and ex-ante risk adjusted performance than do mutual funds. Sensible advice for most investors would be to hold low cost index funds and avoid holding past "active" loser funds. Only very sophisticated investors should pursue an active investment strategy of trying to pick winners - and then with much caution.

When Jeremy Siegel published his Stocks for the Long Run thesis, little information was available on stocks before 1871 or bonds before 1926. But today, digital archives have made it possible to compute real total return on stock and bond indexes back to 1793. This paper presents that new market history and compares it to Siegel’s narrative. The new historical record shows that over multi-decade periods, sometimes stocks outperformed bonds, sometimes bonds outperformed stocks, and sometimes they performed about the same. More generally, the pattern of asset returns in the modern era, as seen in the Ibbotson SBBI and other datasets that begin in 1926, emerges as distinctly different from what came before. Contrary to Siegel, the pattern of asset returns seen in the 20th century does not generalize to the 19th century. A regime perspective is introduced to make sense of the augmented historical record. It argues that both common stocks and long bonds are risk assets, capable of outperforming or underperforming over any human time horizon. [A version has now published in the Financial Analysts Journal, see revision notes in paper.]

This paper addresses 18 finance topics that are badly explained by many Finance Professors. The topics are: 1. Where does the WACC equation come from?2. The WACC is not a cost.3. The WACC equation when the value of debt is not equal to its nominal value.4. The term equity premium is used to designate four different concepts.5. Textbooks differ a lot on their recommendations regarding the equity premium6. Which Equity Premium do professors, analysts and practitioners use?7. Calculated (historical) betas change dramatically from one day to the next.8. Why do many professors still use calculated (historical) betas in class?9. EVA does not measure Shareholder value creation.10. The relationship between the WACC and the value of the tax shields (VTS).11. Beta and CAPM do not explain anything about expected or required returns.12. Difference between the expected and the required rates of return.13. It has been very easy to beat the S&P500 in 2000-2018.14. Apply the logic principle “Never buy a hair growth lotion from a man with no hair” to your investment advisors… and to your professors.15. Rational investing in equities.16. Volatility is a bad measure of risk.17. About the unhelpfulness of the Sharpe ratio.18. Common errors in portfolio management and wrong advices.

The shape of the volatility smirk has significant cross-sectional predictive power for future equity returns. Stocks exhibiting the steepest smirks in their traded options underperform stocks with the least pronounced volatility smirks in their options by around 10.9% per year on a risk-adjusted basis. This predictability persists for at least six months, and firms with the steepest volatility smirks are those experiencing the worst earnings shocks in the following quarter. The results are consistent with the notion that informed traders with negative news prefer to trade out-of-the-money put options, and that the equity market is slow in incorporating the information embedded in volatility smirks.

In the earliest days of empirical work in academic finance, the size effect was the first market anomaly to challenge the standard asset pricing model and prompt debates about market efficiency. The notion that small stocks have higher average returns than large stocks, even after risk-adjustment, was a pathbreaking discovery, one that for decades has been taken as an unwavering fact of financial markets. In practice, the discovery of the size effect fueled a crowd of small cap indices and active funds to a point where the investment landscape is now segmented into large and small stock universes. Despite its long and illustrious history in academia and its commonplace acceptance in practice, there is still confusion and debate about the size effect. We examine many claims about the size effect and aim to clarify some of the misunderstanding surrounding it by performing simple tests using publicly available data.

The portfolio of the average investor contains important information for strategic asset allocation purposes. This portfolio shows the relative value of all assets according to the market crowd, which one could interpret as a benchmark or the optimal portfolio for the average investor. We determine the market values of equities, private equity, real estate, high yield bonds, emerging debt, non-government bonds, government bonds, inflation linked bonds, commodities, and hedge funds. For this range of assets, we estimate the invested global market portfolio for the period 1990-2011. For the main asset categories equities, real estate, non-government bonds and government bonds we extend the period to 1959-2011. To our understanding, we are the first to document the global multi-asset market portfolio at these levels of detail for such a long period of time.

Pairs trading is a popular trading strategy that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies in order to obtain profit. Such approach, on its classical formulation, uses information of only two stocks (a stock and its pairs) in the formation of the trading signals. The objective of this paper is to suggest a multivariate version of pairs trading, which will try to create an artificial pair for a particular stock based on the information of m assets, instead of just one. The performance of three different versions of the multivariate approach was assessed for the Brazilian financial market using daily data from 2000 to 2006 for 57 assets. Considering realistic transaction costs, the analysis of performance was conducted with the calculation of raw and excessive returns, beta and alpha calculation, and the use of bootstrap methods for comparing performance indicators against portfolios build with random trading signals. The main conclusion of the paper is that the proposed version was able to beat the benchmark returns and random portfolios for the majority of the parameters. The performance is also found superior to the classic version of the strategy, Perlin (2006b). Another information derived from the research is that the proposed strategy picks up volatility from the data, that is, the annualized standard deviations of the returns are quite high. But, such event is paid by high positive returns at the long and short positions. This result is also supported by the positive annualized sharpe ratios presented by the strategy. Regarding systematic risk, the results showed that the proposed strategy does have a statistically significant beta, but it isn't high in value, meaning that the relationship between return and risk for the trading rules is still attractive.

This paper examines the implementation of a simple pairs trading strategy with automatic extreme risk control using the entire universe of securities in the highly liquid secondary market for U.S. government debt. It documents, from a practical viewpoint, the contrasts in the generic features of pairs trading with such securities compared with equities. The rewards emanating from the proposed strategy, after constructing an appropriate risk benchmark, are appraised using various traditional and relatively newer metrics. Using data from the repo and money market, estimates are also made of the distribution of absolute returns after accounting for financing and transaction costs.

Spanish Abstract: En esta nota se repasan los conceptos y parámetros de valoración por descuento de flujos (y la relación entre ellos) con cuatro ejemplos sencillos. Se valoran inicialmente las acciones de una empresa sin deuda ni crecimiento (una perpetuidad). Posteriormente se introduce crecimiento y deuda. Finalmente se valora una empresa con deuda y crecimientos cambiantes.English Abstract: We review concepts and parameters used in discounted cash-flow valuations (and their relationship) with four easy examples.

One of the most exciting recent developments in financial research is the availability of new administrative, private sector and micro-level datasets that did not exist a few years ago. The unstructured nature of many of these observations, along with the complexity of the phenomena they measure, means that many of these datasets are beyond the grasp of econometric analysis. Machine learning (ML) techniques offer the numerical power and functional flexibility needed to identify complex patterns in a high-dimensional space. However, ML is often perceived as a black box, in contrast with the transparency of econometric approaches. In this article, the author demonstrates that each analytical step of the econometric process has a homologous step in ML analyses. By clearly stating this correspondence, the author’s goal is to facilitate and reconcile the adoption of ML techniques among econometricians.

For more than seventeen years, Bernard Madoff operated what was viewed as one of the most successful investment strategies in the world. This strategy ultimately collapsed in December 2008 in what financial experts are calling one of the most detrimental Ponzi schemes in history. Many large and otherwise sophisticated bankers, hedge funds, and funds of funds have been hit by his alleged fraud. In this paper, we review some of the red flags that any operational due diligence and quantitative analysis should have identified as a concern prior to investing. We highlight some of the salient operational features common to best-of-breed hedge funds, features that were clearly missing from Madoff's operations.

A bull market, and the incentives of those who make their living from bull markets, can create its own form of logic. This book explores some of the stories that encourage the purchase or retention of stocks or mutual funds and the logic behind these stories. Some of these stories are honest attempts to explain new phenomenon, and may or may not prove true going forward. Some seem to be unintended falsehoods that come from an incomplete or lazy application of economic reasoning. Finally, some seem less well intended. The stories, and the logical analyses behind them, generally originate with Wall Street (both sell side and buy side), sometimes riding the coattails of academia, and are often readily absorbed by investors engaged in wishful thinking. Such wishful thinking has led to a stock market, and the growth/tech sector of the market in particular, that is priced so expensively that even very long-term investors will probably end up disappointed, perhaps greatly so.

We develop an asset pricing model with flexible heterogeneity in asset demand across investors, designed to match institutional and household holdings. A portfolio choice model implies characteristics-based demand when returns have a factor structure and expected returns and factor loadings depend on the assets' own characteristics. We propose an instrumental variables estimator for the characteristics-based demand system to address the endogeneity of demand and asset prices. Using US stock market data, we illustrate how the model could be used to understand the role of institutions in asset market movements, volatility, and predictability.

This paper identifies problems related to RIV in an equity valuation context. Three problems are discussed. First, on a per share basis clean surplus will not generally hold if there are expected changes in shares outstanding; this aspect eliminates a necessary condition for the RIV-formula to be valid. Second, an all equity approach does not work if the firm plans to bring in "new" shareholders who derive a net benefit from their capital contributions. Third, GAAP violates clean surplus because some capital contributions are not accounted for in market value terms. As an alternative to RIV, the paper shows that it makes more economic/accounting sense to focus on expected eps, adjusted for dps, as a valuation attribute instead of current book value and expected residual earnings.

Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the US mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability. Being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high sustainability led to net inflows of more than $24 billion. Experimental evidence suggests that sustainability is viewed as positively predicting future performance, but we do not find evidence that high sustainability funds outperform low sustainability funds. The evidence is consistent with positive affect influencing expectations of sustainable fund performance and non-pecuniary motives influencing investment decisions.

A four-factor model with two “mispricing” factors, in addition to market and size factors, accommodates a large set of anomalies better than notable four- and five-factor alternative models. Moreover, our size factor reveals a small-firm premium nearly twice usual estimates. The mispricing factors aggregate information across 11 prominent anomalies by averaging rankings within two clusters exhibiting the greatest return comovement. Investor sentiment predicts the mispricing factors, especially their short legs, consistent with a mispricing interpretation and the asymmetry in ease of buying versus shorting. A three-factor model with a single mispricing factor also performs well, especially in Bayesian model comparisons.

This paper presents the Capital Cash Flow method for valuing risky cash flows. I show that the Capital Cash Flow method is equivalent to discounting Free Cash Flows by the weighted average cost of capital. Because the interest tax shields are included in the cash flows, the Capital Cash Flow approach is easier to apply when the level of debt changes or when a specific amount of debt is projected. The paper also compares the Capital Cash Flow method to the Adjusted Present Value method and provides consistent leverage adjustment formulas for both methods.

Improving European corporate governance after Enron requires rethinking company and capital market regulation and law reforms. This article - which is an updated version (footnotes and references only, summer 2006) of an earlier one published in (2003) 3 Journal of Corporate Law Studies 221-268 - discusses shareholder decision-making; the choice between the one-tier and the two-tier board system; appointment, compensation and audit committees with a majority of independent members; checks on exorbitant payments to the directors; a special investigation procedure and wrongful trading. As to capital markets a European framework rule on prospectus liabilty is proposed. A key problem is the need for loyal and competent intermediaries. Since the 13th Directive is only a compromise solution, the hopes are pinned on the Court to continue its golden share case law. The German Volkswagen Act will be a test case.

During the recent stock market bubble, the traditional financial reporting model was assailed as a backward looking system, out of date in the Information Age. With the bursting of the bubble, the quality of financial reporting is again under scrutiny, but now for not adhering to traditional principles of sound earnings measurement, asset and liability recognition. This paper is a retrospective on the quality of financial reporting during the 1990s. Did reporting under U.S. GAAP perform well during the bubble, or is its quality suspect? My premise is that financial reporting should serve as an anchor during bubbles, to check speculative beliefs. With a focus on the shareholder as customer, the paper asks whether shareholders were well served or whether financial reporting helped to pyramid earnings and stock prices. The scorecard is mixed. A number of quality features of accounting are identified. Inevitable imperfections due to measurement difficulties are recognized, as a quality warning to analysts and investors. And a number of failures of GAAP and financial disclosures are identified which, if not recognized, can promote momentum investing and stock market bubbles.

Convex optimization solutions tend to be unstable, to the point of entirely offsetting the benefits of optimization. For example, in the context of financial applications, it is known that portfolios optimized in-sample often underperform the naïve (equal weights) allocation out-of-sample. This instability can be traced back to two sources: (i) noise in the input variables; and (ii) signal structure that magnifies the estimation errors in the input variables. A first innovation of this paper is to introduce the nested clustered optimization algorithm (NCO), a method that tackles both sources of instability.Over the past 60 years, various approaches have been developed to address these two sources of instability. These approaches are flawed in the sense that different methods may be appropriate for different input variables, and it is unrealistic to expect that one method will dominate all the rest under all circumstances. Accordingly, a second innovation of this paper is to introduce MCOS, a Monte Carlo approach that estimates the allocation error produced by various optimization methods on a particular set of input variables. The result is a precise determination of what method is most robust to a particular case. Thus, rather than relying always on one particular approach, MCOS allows users to apply opportunistically whatever optimization method is best suited in a particular setting.Presentation materials are available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3469964.

This paper offers a view of the relevance of value relevance research for financial accounting standard setting that contrasts with the view offered in Holthausen and Watts (2001) (hereafter HW). A key conclusion of HW is that value relevance research offers little or no insight for standard setting. As active participants in value relevance research, our purpose is to clarify the relevance of the value relevance literature to financial accounting standard setting. Because we are discussants of HW, we only address issues raised in that paper. In particular, HW is limited in scope to a discussion of the relevance of the value relevance literature for financial accounting standard setting; it does not comprehensively review the value relevance literature. Accordingly, our discussion is similarly limited. A key conclusion of our paper is that the value relevance literature provides fruitful insights for standard setting. This paper also clarifies several misconceptions articulated in HW regarding value relevance research. In particular, in contrast with HW, we conclude: (1) value relevance research provides insights into questions of interest to standard setters and other non-academic constituents. (2) A primary focus of the FASB and other standard setters is equity investment. The possible contracting and other uses of financial statements in no way diminish the importance of value relevance research. (3) Empirical implementations of extant valuation models can be used to address questions of value relevance despite their simplifying assumptions. (4) Value relevance research can accommodate conservatism, and can be used to study its implications for the relation between accounting amounts and equity values. (5) Value relevance studies are designed to assess whether particular accounting amounts reflect information that is used by investors in valuing firms' equity, not to estimate firm value. (6) Value relevance research employs well-established techniques for mitigating the effects of various econometric issues that arise in value relevance studies.

This paper examines the proposition that investing in common stocks is less risky the longer an investor plans to hold them. If the proposition were true, then the cost of insuring against earning less than the risk-free rate of interest should decline as the length of the investment horizon increases. The paper shows that the opposite is true even if stock returns are "mean-reverting" in the long run. The case for young people investing more heavily in stocks than old people cannot, therefore, rest solely on the long-run properties of stock returns. For guarantors of money-fixed annuities, the proposition that stocks in their portfolio are a better hedge the longer the maturity of their obligations is unambiguously wrong.