Fox has done an outstanding job of describing this period of history with not only dead theories, but also the live stories behind them from many vital contributors of the past century. He is able to provide persuasive and balanced discussion with open-minded history. Going through this book, we realized the importance to study and understand what makes current stock prices hard to exploit consistently, and when prices can be affected and controlled. The current fall of the financial market requires us to re-examine what we have learned, known, and developed. This book, as one of the bestselling book in 2010, provides us with a timeline of how modern financial theories are evolved, acknowledges the contribution from all the economic and financial giants, and encourages readers to understand the limitations of theories. Fox puts a great emphasis on the evolution of one of the foundational financial theories, efficient markets hypothesis. It has been a very influential theory, even beyond the academia. It affects the way we run a company, how executives will be paid, and how market should be regulated. However, it is easy to describe. According to our textbook, it is the “idea that competition among investors works to eliminate all positive-NPV trading opportunities. It implies that securities will be fairly priced, based on their future cash flows, given all information that is available to investors” (Berk & DeMarzo, 2014, p.295). Thus, there is competition in the market and there is public information available in the market. “The degree of competition, and therefore the accuracy of the efficient markets hypothesis, will depend on the number of investors who possess this information” (p. 296). In addition, in the perfect rationa... ... middle of paper ... ...del, the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, and all the other major elements of modern rationalist finance? According to Fox (2009), “theories’ heavy reliance on calmly rational markets was to some extent the artifact of a regulated, relatively conservative financial era – and it pave the way for deregulation and wild exuberance” (p. 320). We do agree with Fox “it is hard to beat the market” (Fox, 2009, p. 306). We are still in the process of learning and getting to know more about the market. The efficient market hypothesis is a theory, like other theory, that is an important source with its own limitations. Like Fox, he has not been able to draw a conclusion about the validity of the efficient market hypothesis. He says “I’ve continued to struggle with what to make of the conflicting but not diametrically opposed worldviews of Fama and Thaler” (Fox, 2009, p. 299)
Not only were millions of Americans been put out of work due to these manager’s actions, the American financial markets themselves were pushed to the brink of collapse. Despite the fact that the global financial markets, in reality, are not perfectly efficient, there is a corrective mechanism built into the day-to-day trading in the market. When prices are driven down by large sells, either by large investors or a movement in a stock, there are usually new buyers for these stocks at the cheaper price. Managers of...
It is often said that perception outweighs reality and that is often the view of the stock market. News that a certain stock may be on the rise can set off a buying spree, while a tip that one may be on decline might entice people to sell. The fact that no one really knows what is going to happen one way or the other is inconsequential. John Kenneth Galbraith uses the concept of speculation as a major theme in his book The Great Crash 1929. Galbraith’s portrayal of the market before the crash focuses largely on massive speculation of overvalued stocks which were inevitably going to topple and take the wealth of the shareholders down with it. After all, the prices could not continue to go up forever. Widespread speculation was no doubt a major player in the crash, but many other factors were in play as well. While the speculation argument has some merit, the reasons for the collapse and its lasting effects had many moving parts that cannot be explained so simply.
It has been said that every good thing must arrive at an end. On account of the Roaring Twenties that end came suddenly and startlingly. It is simple for one to think back upon the monetary circumstance that prompt the accident and disparagement the specialists for not seeing the indications of a potential calamity. Be that as it may, it was not all that simple for them to see such an accident coming. The 1920 's were a blasting decade and stock costs appeared to be at an unfaltering move for an apparently interminable ascent. Numerous elements can be ascribed to the reason for the accident however nobody element can be singled out as the lone reason. The real reasons for the share trading system accident of 1929
F. Scott Fitzgerald delineated the Roaring Twenties in The Great Gatsby as “the parties were bigger. The pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper.” It was the era marked by social changes and splendous parties and self-made millionaires. However, unprecedented to Fitzgerald and many of his contemporaries was that said glamourous lifestyle was built on a precarious foundation. When the stock market crashed in 1929, it put a period to the beguiling era and opened Americans to a horrid epoch. Yet, in actuality, the Stock market crash is an inexorable consequence of a time so reckless such as the Roaring Twenties. Some identified causes of the eventual crash are margin buying, overproduction of goods, and banks investing in stocks with depositors’ funds.
In October 1929, the United States stock market crashed due to panic selling. This crash started a rippling effect that contributed to a world wide economic crisis called the Great Depression. This crash was such a shock because of the economic expansion of the 1920’s when the Dow Jones average reached an all time high of three hundred eighty one. The year 1928 was a time of optimism and the stock market had become a place where everyday people truly believed that they could become rich. People everywhere were talking about the market and newspapers were reporting stories of ordinary people such as chauffeurs, maids, and teachers making millions off the stock market. People who didn’t have the money bought on margin. The stock market was booming and the excitement about the market caused a lot of over speculation. People ignored the small signs of the impending crash until Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. Four days later the stock market fell again.
Warren Buffet once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago” (Buffett, Cunningham 51). During the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in history, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors, the Great Depression, Warren Buffet was buying and selling his first stocks. Amid the difficult times, Warren Buffett became one of the greatest investors ever and is regularly ranked among the wealthiest people in the world with a net-worth of 66.7 billion dollars (“History”).
Assuming that there are no costs applied, and the investors have the ability to buy and sell securities and they also have the knowledge of any change; no costs for buying or selling of securities for brokers for example. Modigliani and Miller’s assumption is that all of these capital market factors which is needed for trading of securities are all perfect.
In early 1928 the Dow Jones Average went from a low of 191 early in the year, to a high of 300 in December of 1928 and peaked at 381 in September of 1929. (1929…) It was anticipated that the increases in earnings and dividends would continue. (1929…) The price to earnings ratings rose from 10 to 12 to 20 and higher for the market’s favorite stocks. (1929…) Observers believed that stock market prices in the first 6 months of 1929 were high, while others saw them to be cheap. (1929…) On October 3rd, the Dow Jones Average began to drop, declining through the week of October 14th. (1929…)
In summary, investors on the whole are rational and contribute to an efficient market through prudent investment decisions. Each investor?s optimal portfolio will be different depending on the feasible set of portfolios available for investment as well as the indifference curve for that particular investor. Lastly, risk free borrowing and lending changes the efficient set and gives the investor more opportunities to either get a higher expected return with the same amount of risk or the same amount of return with less risk.
Recently a new trend has taken up Wall Street. Savvy broker firms have realized that the market is probably controlled by some rules, and those rules have to be found to make more money with the least risk. They hired many mathematicians to look for any formulas that would seem to express the market. Those analyzed previous market trends and used laws of statistics to try to predict the “future” of the market. The funny thing is that at times this approach actually worked. It yielded a slightly more than fifty percent accuracy, and that was enough. (When dealing with tremendous amounts, even a small percentage is not meager.)
Chapter 11 closes our discussion with several insights into the efficient market theory. There have been many attempts to discredit the random walk theory, but none of the theories hold against empirical evidence. Any pattern that is noticed by investors will disappear as investors try to exploit it and the valuation methods of growth rate are far too difficult to predict. As we said before the random walk concludes that no patterns exist in the market, pricing is accurate and all information available is already incorporated into the stock price. Therefore the market is efficient. Even if errors do occur in short-run pricing, they will correct themselves in the long run. The random walk suggest that short-term prices cannot be predicted and to buy stocks for the long run. Malkiel concludes the best way to consistently be profitable is to buy and hold a broad based market index fund. As the market rises so will the investors returns since historically the market continues to rise as a whole.
I became an enthusiast of finance ever since I was at high school. At the political economy class, my teacher asked us: if you have a million RMB, how would you use it? She then introduced us the concept of investment, and I was intrigued specifically by the stock. For the latter two years of my high school, I have been reading books and articles regarding the stock market in the U.S. and in China. As one of the outstanding students ranked top 1% in College Entrance Exam in Hainan Province, China, I was accepted by the City University of Hong Kong with a full scholarship. With the strong interest in finance, I chose quantitative finance and risk management as my major.
The efficient market hypothesis has been one of the main topics of academic finance research. The efficient market hypotheses also know as the joint hypothesis problem, asserts that financial markets lack solid hard information in making decisions. Efficient market hypothesis claims it is impossible to beat the market because stock market efficiency causes existing share prices to always incorporate and reflect all relevant information . According to efficient market hypothesis stocks always trade at their fair value on stock exchanges, making it impossible for investors to either purchase undervalued stocks or sell stocks for inflated prices. As such, it should be impossible to outperform the overall market through expert stock selection or market timing, and that the only way an investor can possibly obtain higher returns is by purchasing riskier investments . In reality once cannot always achieve returns in excess of average market return on a risk-adjusted basis. They have been numerous arguments against the efficient market hypothesis. Some researches point out the fact financial theories are subjective, in other words they are ideas that try to explain how markets work and behave.
The stock market is an essential part of a free-market economy, such as America’s. This is because it provides companies the capital they need in exchange for giving away small parts of ownership in their company to investors. The stock market works by letting different companies sell stocks to gain capital, meaning they sell shares of their company through an exchange system in order to make more money. Stocks represent a small amount of ownership in a company. The more stocks a person owns, the more ownership they have of that company. Stocks also represent shares in a company, which are equal parts in which the company’s capital is divided, entitling a shareholder to a portion of the company’s profits. Lastly, all of the buying and selling of stocks happens at an exchange. An exchange is a system or market in which stocks can be bought and sold within or between countries. All of these aspects together create the stock market.
This paper will define and discuss five financial theories and how they impact business decisions made by financial managers. The theories will be the Modern Portfolio Theory, Tobin Separation Theorem, Equilibrium Theory, Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.