Skip to main content

Financial Market Theory and Soros

George Soros, in a speech at Davos, stated that we know very little about how financial markets work(click here).  61 years after Harry Markowitz's famous paper, and 50 years since Samuelson and Fama developed the efficient markets hypothesis, and 40 years after the Black-Scholes-Merton model, we are still no further forward in understanding financial markets according to Soros! What are we to do? Some scholars think that behavioural finance is the way to go. The application of psychology to financial markets is certainly interesting and potentially fruitful. However, my own hunch is that we need to understand better the role of government in manipulating and influencing financial markets.
 
   

Popular posts from this blog

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...
Read more

Bitcoin Bubble?

According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money.   George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here .  Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.
Read more

Facebook

My previous posts ( here and here ) on Facebook indicated that I thought Facebook stock was a poor investment.  Yesterday Facebook made its maiden quarterly report to the market and investors did not like what they heard.  Facebook shares were floated at $38.  In after-hours trading yesterday, they were trading at $23.75!  The Daily Telegraph's coverage of Facebook's maiden financial report is available here .
Read more