This study examines the Morningstar rating system as a predictor of mutual fund performance for U.S. domestic equit funds. We also compare the predictive abilities of the Morningstar rating system with those of alternative predictors. The results indicate findings that are robust across different samples, ages and styles of funds, and performance measures. First, low ratings from Morningstar generally indicate relatively poor future performance. Second, there is little statistical evidence that Morningstar's highest-rated funds outperform the next-to-highest and median-rated funds. Third, Morningstar ratings, at best, do only slightly better than the alternative predictors in forecasting future fund performance.

The weighted average cost of capital (Ko) is presented in virtually all textbooks in financial management and capital budgeting as a practical concept fundamental to the actual selection of optimal financial and investment alternatives. As often employed Ko can be defined aswhereKo = the weighted average cost of capital, Ks = the cost of equity capital, Kb = the cost of debt capital, S = the market value of the firm's equity, B = the market value of the firm's debt, andV = S + B, the total market value of the firm.

The trading of security options is one of the fastest growing and most dynamic areas of investment concern. When the Chicago Board of Trade's proposal to develop an exchange for trading option contracts is implemented, security option trading will become an even more important aspect of the investment world.

Trading in currencies in order to obtain the best possible exchange rate is known as arbitrage and can broadly be divided into three categories:1) Space Arbitrage––transactions to take advantage of discrepancies between rates quoted at the same time in different markets.2) Time Arbitrage––transactions to take advantage of discrepancies between forward margins for different maturities.3) Interest Arbitrage––transactions to take advantage of discrepancies between yield on short-term investments in different currencies. This form of arbitrage can be split into (a) Covered and (b) Uncovered (speculative) interest arbitrage. The former variety uses today's forward rate for forward conversion back into our holding currency; the latter allows the dealer to use the spot rate existing in the future.

This paper tests whether the persistence of the momentum and reversal effects is the result of idiosyncratic risk limiting arbitrage. Idiosyncratic risk deters arbitrage, regardless of the arbitrageur’s diversification. Reversal is prevalent only in high idiosyncratic risk stocks, suggesting that idiosyncratic risk limits arbitrage in reversal mispricing. This finding is robust to controls for transaction costs, informed trading, and systematic relations between idiosyncratic risk and subsequent returns. Momentum is not related to idiosyncratic risk. Momentum generates a smaller aggregate return than reversal, so the findings along with those in related studies suggest that transaction costs are sufficient to prevent arbitrageurs from eliminating momentum mispricing.

This paper tests the Value Additivity Principle (VAP) of financial assets with the pricing of Standard Oil securities in 1912. The results are somewhat mixed: the VAP does not generally describe the daily prices of equivalent Standard Oil portfolios, but it accurately describes their average market values; and the portfolio values display convergent adjustment behavior that tends to equalize them quite rapidly. On balance, these findings are consistent with the VAP.

This paper examines whether investors with power utility functions choose mean-variance-(MV) efficient portfolios when returns are approximately normally distributed and there is borrowing or lending at a riskless interest rate. The results show that the unlevered portfolios of power utility investors plot very closely to the MV-efficient frontier. However, there are marked differences in the mix of risky assets, regardless of whether the portfolios are highly concentrated or widely diversified. Such differences allow power investors to remain solvent even when they lever their optimal portfolios to a greater extent than “less risk-averse” MV investors who risk bankruptcy. It is concluded that the investment policies of power utility and MV investors with similar risk aversion measures are not as similar as is commonly believed. This is particularly true for high power investors, unless explicit solvency constraints are imposed on the MV problem, and for low power investors when quadratic utility approximations are made to the power utility functions. These differences in the investment policies of power utility and MV investors lead us to question the widely-accepted assertion that the assumptions of homogeneous beliefs, normality, a riskless asset, and risk-averse investors imply the simple MV CAPM where all investors, including power utility investors, hold combinations of the market portfolio and the riskless asset.

Common stock portfolios of large, heavily traded firms exhibit daily first-order serial correlation in excess of what would be expected, given the individual security coefficients. Further, this correlation rises as the number of securities in the portfolio increases. The direct implication of this finding is that nonsynchronous trading is not the only cause of correlation in daily market indices. Related implications are also discussed.

This paper treats a problem of stochastic cash management under an average compensating-balance requirement. It develops a dynamic programming formulation of the problem in which the relevant state is a unidimensional quantity equivalent to the forecasted average balance at the end of the averaging period. Under usably broad conditions, it establishes the optimality of a transient policy of simple type, similar to the two-sided inventory type policy familiar from certain earlier studies of stationary cash balance problems having absolute balance requirements. The results apply to cases in which the transactions costs contain both fixed and proportional components. The paper discusses also a numerical example drawn from the literature of the cash balance problem and shows by simulation of the optimal (and simply modified forms of the optimal) policy, that good protection is afforded against negative balances, even though the model does not explicitly constrain the negative-balance probabilities.

This paper models the unobservable rate of return on money balances (r) as depending directly on the transactions velocity of money (ν). Approximating this relationship linearly, the efficient markets hyphothesis (EMH) is shown to imply that first differences of the log of ν should either be random or should show negative first-order serial correlation at most. The empirical evidence presented below is consistent with the EMH.