In the September 1975 issue of this Journal Ben Branch works out in detail an “optimal” strategy for an investor seeking to purchase or sell a security. The suggested strategy involves placing limit orders at specified prices and then waiting for the order to be filled. Hypothetical calculations indicate the magnitude of savings possible through use of the strategy. Ben Branch apparently accepts the standard random walk model and develops his theory around it. If one believes that the value of a stock is a constant and that prices fluctuate randomly, the treatment seems correct.

This paper by Hughes, Logue, and Sweeney offers an excellent summary of recent theoretical work on the advantages of multinational firms in providing opportunities for international diversification. In addition, some interesting empirical tests of an international version of the capital asset pricing model (IAPM) are reported. Neither of these topics is original as several writers have explored the theoretical advantages of the multinational firm providing international diversification, including this discussant [1]. The IAPM has been tested by Solnik [2] and others who find that systematic risk is lower in international financial markets than in domestic ones.

Paul M. Horvitz, Failures of Large Banks: Implications for Banking Supervision and Deposit Insurance, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1975 Proceedings (Nov., 1975), pp. 589-601

The thoughts presented in this paper were developed during the first stage of an ongoing research project. This project is designed to shed light on the management of the size and exchange composition of financial assets and liabilities in the U.S. multinational companies (MNCs). The study also intends to analyze the impact of these policies on the international and national financial markets.

Bernell Stone's paper extends the single-factor market model to a two-factor model to “better” explain the stochastic process that generates security returns. The inductive search for new models (of which his paper is one) presumably is predicated upon some unsatisfactory results of joint tests of the single-index market model and the capital asset pricing model. It is well known that there are other components of systematic or covariance risk that are not explained by the single-market factor. In the most general sense then, one would conclude that the truth of the return generating process is a multiple factor model, given that the process is indeed linear in the factors. Professor Stone chooses a two-factor (or index) model, in which the known factors are: (1) the return on an equity index, and (2) the return on a bond index. To this extent his interesting work is a special case of the more general work of others.

On February 1, 1971, the National Association of Security Dealers instituted an automatic quoting system for over-the-counter stocks. Heralded as a major advance in the elimination of market imperfections, the National Association of Security Dealers Automatic Quote System (NASDAQ) allowed bidand- ask prices of different firms in this geographically dispersed market to be centralized. Essentially its operation allowed individual “houses” to obtain the various bid-and-ask prices of market makers for a given unlisted security.

The FINSIM model provides a fundamental and analytical basis for security evaluation. The methodology presented includes the relevant economic and firm variables in an efficient computational scheme and is useful for:1. reducing the analysts' judgments about the future to a specific stock price (the model described does not replace the analyst, rather it provides the analyst with a vehicle to determine the implications of his critical assumptions);2. testing the probable impact of changed expectations concerning the firm and/or the level of the market on stock value;3. getting at what “the markets” expectations must be to justify the current price;4. determining the value of additional information (are results changed significantly to pay for the expense of refined estimates?);5. determining the impact of alternative growth horizons on value; and6. determining what the actual growth rate of total earnings must be to overcome the dilution effects of financing with external equity.While the security analyst still faces the problems associated with decision making under uncertainty, the methodology presented facilitates the use of sensitivity analysis to study the implications of uncertain knowledge of parameters.

The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of the theory of Markov processes to the analysis of stock price movements.The present study was prompted by the work of Dryden [6], in which aggregate data on United Kingdom share prices were analyzed within a Markovian framework, and which indicated that it might be fruitful to apply the Markov model to more disaggregated data, specifically to individual stock price data.

Elliott's basic proposition is praiseworthy. Nevertheless, I have a number of serious reservations about the implications of his model and the reliability of its predictions. Some of my reservations relate to the theoretical foundation of the model itself, while others are concerned with his methodology and estimation techniques.

This paper will demonstrate that different margin levels are associated with the price behavior differences of certain commodity futures. In 1959, Harry Roberts suggested the methodology of rational subgrouping as a means of testing random versus systematic price changes. His methodological suggestion has had only limited testing in security markets and no direct application to domestic futures markets. This paper uses margin levels as a basis for rational subgrouping of selected commodity futures. Evidence supports the argument that, when a series of price changes is grouped according to margin levels and these levels are analyzed separately, nonrandom characteristics that tend to be offsetting in the aggregate series become evident. The nonrandom behavior observed is consistent with the hypothesis that, in certain periods, margin levels have been set too high to attract a volume of speculative services necessary for the maintenance of market balance.