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Financial economics is the branch of economics characterized by a "concentration on monetary activities", in which "money of one type or another is likely to appear on both sides of a trade". Its concern is thus the interrelation of financial variables, such as share prices, interest rates and exchange rates, as opposed to those concerning the real economy. It has two main areas of focus: asset pricing and corporate finance; the first being the perspective of providers of capital, i.e. investors, and the second of users of capital. It thus provides the theoretical underpinning for much of finance.
In finance, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is a model used to determine a theoretically appropriate required rate of return of an asset, to make decisions about adding assets to a well-diversified portfolio.
The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossible to "beat the market" consistently on a risk-adjusted basis since market prices should only react to new information.
Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.
Modern portfolio theory (MPT), or mean-variance analysis, is a mathematical framework for assembling a portfolio of assets such that the expected return is maximized for a given level of risk. It is a formalization and extension of diversification in investing, the idea that owning different kinds of financial assets is less risky than owning only one type. Its key insight is that an asset's risk and return should not be assessed by itself, but by how it contributes to a portfolio's overall risk and return. It uses the variance of asset prices as a proxy for risk.
In finance, arbitrage pricing theory (APT) is a multi-factor model for asset pricing which relates various macro-economic (systematic) risk variables to the pricing of financial assets. Proposed by economist Stephen Ross in 1976, it is widely believed to be an improved alternative to its predecessor, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). APT is founded upon the law of one price, which suggests that within an equilibrium market, rational investors will implement arbitrage such that the equilibrium price is eventually realised. As such, APT argues that when opportunities for arbitrage are exhausted in a given period, then the expected return of an asset is a linear function of various factors or theoretical market indices, where sensitivities of each factor is represented by a factor-specific beta coefficient or factor loading. Consequently, it provides traders with an indication of ‘true’ asset value and enables exploitation of market discrepancies via arbitrage. The linear factor model structure of the APT is used as the basis for evaluating asset allocation, the performance of managed funds as well as the calculation of cost of capital.
In finance, the beta is a measure of how an individual asset moves when the overall stock market increases or decreases. Thus, beta is a useful measure of the contribution of an individual asset to the risk of the market portfolio when it is added in small quantity. Thus, beta is referred to as an asset's non-diversifiable risk, its systematic risk, market risk, or hedge ratio. Beta is not a measure of idiosyncratic risk.
Market portfolio is a portfolio consisting of a weighted sum of every asset in the market, with weights in the proportions that they exist in the market, with the necessary assumption that these assets are infinitely divisible.
A market anomaly in a financial market is predictability that seems to be inconsistent with theories of asset prices. Standard theories include the capital asset pricing model and the Fama-French Three Factor Model, but a lack of agreement among academics about the proper theory leads many to refer to anomalies without a reference to a benchmark theory. Indeed, many academics simply refer to anomalies as "return predictors", avoiding the problem of defining a benchmark theory.
The random walk hypothesis is a financial theory stating that stock market prices evolve according to a random walk and thus cannot be predicted.
Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is most famous for his work on asset pricing with Eugene Fama. They wrote a series of papers that cast doubt on the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which posits that a stock's beta alone should explain its average return. These papers describe two factors above and beyond a stock's market beta which can explain differences in stock returns: market capitalization and "value". They also offer evidence that a variety of patterns in average returns, often labeled as "anomalies" in past work, can be explained with their Fama–French three-factor model.
Sanford "Sandy" Jay Grossman is an American economist and hedge fund manager specializing in quantitative finance. Grossman’s research has spanned the analysis of information in securities markets, corporate structure, property rights, and optimal dynamic risk management. He has published widely in leading economic and business journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, Econometrica, and Journal of Finance. His research in macroeconomics, finance, and risk management has earned numerous awards. Grossman is currently Chairman and CEO of QFS Asset Management, an affiliate of which he founded in 1988. QFS Asset Management shut down its sole remaining hedge fund in January 2014.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
There are several concepts of efficiency for a financial market. The most widely discussed is informational or price efficiency, which is a measure of how quickly and completely the price of a single asset reflects available information about the asset's value. Other concepts include functional/operational efficiency, which is inversely related to the costs that investors bear for making transactions, and allocative efficiency, which is a measure of how far a market channels funds from ultimate lenders to ultimate borrowers in such a way that the funds are used in the most productive manner.
Richard Roll is an American economist and professor of finance at UCLA, best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical.
Roll's critique is a famous analysis of the validity of empirical tests of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by Richard Roll. It concerns methods to formally test the statement of the CAPM, the equation
In finance, momentum is the empirically observed tendency for rising asset prices or securities return to rise further, and falling prices to keep falling. For instance, it was shown that stocks with strong past performance continue to outperform stocks with poor past performance in the next period with an average excess return of about 1% per month. Momentum signals have been shown to be used by financial analysts in their buy and sell recommendations.
In asset pricing and portfolio management the Fama–French three-factor model is a statistical model designed in 1992 by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French to describe stock returns. Fama and French were colleagues at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where Fama still works. In 2013, Fama shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical analysis of asset prices. The three factors are (1) market excess return, (2) the outperformance of small versus big companies, and (3) the outperformance of high book/market versus low book/market companies. There is academic debate about the last two factors.
In investing and finance, the low-volatility anomaly is the observation that low-volatility stocks have higher returns than high-volatility stocks in most markets studied. This is an example of a stock market anomaly since it contradicts the central prediction of many financial theories that taking higher risk must be compensated with higher returns.
Factor investing is an investment approach that involves targeting quantifiable firm characteristics or “factors” that can explain differences in stock returns. Security characteristics that may be included in a factor-based approach include size, low-volatility, value, momentum, asset growth, profitability, leverage, term and cost of carry.
References
- ↑ Fama, Eugene F. (1970). "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work". The Journal of Finance. 25 (2): 383–417. doi:10.2307/2325486. ISSN 0022-1082.
- ↑ Ball, Ray (1978-06-01). "Anomalies in relationships between securities' yields and yield-surrogates". Journal of Financial Economics. 6 (2): 103–126. doi:10.1016/0304-405X(78)90026-0. ISSN 0304-405X.
- ↑ Banz, Rolf W. (1981-03-01). "The relationship between return and market value of common stocks". Journal of Financial Economics. 9 (1): 3–18. doi:10.1016/0304-405X(81)90018-0. ISSN 0304-405X.
- ↑ Hansen, Lars Peter; Richard, Scott F. (1987). "The Role of Conditioning Information in Deducing Testable Restrictions Implied by Dynamic Asset Pricing Models". Econometrica. 55 (3): 587–613. doi:10.2307/1913601. ISSN 0012-9682.
