How Well Does the Stock Market Discount? Dell as a Case Study

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 7, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments The deal to take U.S. computer maker Dell Inc. (DELL) private provides an answer to a question that initially occurred to me many years ago while working as a portfolio manager during the dot.com era. My idea was to check the stock market’s discounting abilities with a real world example. Put another way, I dreamed of looking at the market capitalization of a business over long periods of its...
read more

Reframing the Gold Standard Debate: The Fixed-Money-Supply Standard

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Feb 12, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments A debate between those advocating for a fiat money supply and those advocating for a gold standard has been raging for nearly a century. It’s time to reframe this debate in order to highlight some of the intrinsic properties of gold that are germane to this polemic and to inform the discussion of using gold as the philosophical basis for intelligent and prudent monetary policy. This much...
read more

Rescaled Range Analysis: A Method for Detecting Persistence, Randomness, or Mean Reversion in Financial Markets

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 30, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Editor’s note: Thanks to the diligence of Armin Grueneich this post has been amended to reflect the addition of step #5, below, in the calculation of the rescaled range. Rescaled range analysis is a statistical technique designed to assess the nature and magnitude of variability in data over time. In investing rescaled range analysis has been used to detect and evaluate the amount of...
read more

An Emotional Finance Approach to Fund Management: Stress-Coping Mechanisms

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Oct 22, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments In the recent Research Foundation of CFA Institute publication, Fund Management: An Emotional Finance Perspective, coauthors David Tuckett and Richard J. Taffler tell a compelling story about the myriad emotional stresses confronted by both analysts and portfolio managers. What they find stands in stark contrast to the world of perfectly rational decision making assumed by the efficient market...
read more

Rethinking the Risk-Free Rate: Offering Alternatives

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Oct 4, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments In an earlier post, “Rethinking the Risk-Free Rate, Exploding a Fundamental Assumption,” I criticized the concept of the “risk-free rate of return” as both illogical and not reflective of reality. Although I acknowledged the logic of having a bedrock rate of return that serves as a minimum acceptable rate of return, I proposed renaming it the “lowest-available-risk expected rate of...
read more

Untangling the Ethics of Incentives: Interview with Ruth W. Grant

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 19, 2012 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Despite an environment in which many business and financial market commentators, as well as investors, are questioning the size and structure of incentives, there is a shocking lack of new insight about their uses and abuses. In fact, many fault incentives for amplifying the global financial crisis and hindering the ongoing recovery. Enter Ruth W. Grant, professor of political science and...
read more