Michael H. Hopewell, Comment: A Model of Capital Asset Risk, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 7, No. 2, Supplement: Outlook for the Securities Industry (Mar., 1972), pp. 1673-1677

Murphy and Nelson in their article, “Random and Nonrandom Relationships Among Financial Variables: A Financial Model,” develop three postulates which deal with the temporal behavior of financial variables. They suggest that the three postulates constitute a useful financial model. The basis for the model is the distinction between dollar or ratio variables on the one hand and percentage change or growth variables on the other hand.

A temporary trading suspension in a listed security represents a temporal discontinuity in a continuous auction market. Although the SEC occasionally suspends trading in specific securities, the NYSE itself administratively halts trading in individual NYSE issues. The latter occur quite frequently (almost three per day on average), and typically last about two hours. NYSE-initiated suspensions are the focus of the present paper.

Ceteris paribus, investors prefer to purchase municipal bonds selling close to their par value. That is, investors are willing to purchase at the lowest yield a municipal bond alike in all respects to other municipal bonds, but with a coupon that permits it to be sold at or near its par value. Conversely, investors are willing to purchase municipal bonds with coupons that cause them to be sold at prices either greatly above or greatly below par only at penalty or premium yields relative to similar par bonds.