The Performance of Canadian Listed Cannabis Equities: 1996-2020

This research investigates the investment performance of Canadian listed cannabis stocks. Canada legalized medical marijuana in 2001, following the initiation of medical marijuana authorization by some states in the US starting in 1996, and completely approved cannabis products in 2018. Investing in the 89 Canadian cannabis equities (listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Canadian Securities Exchange, Toronto Venture Stock Exchange, and Over-the-Counter Market) as an industry portfolio, based on weekly returns for the 1996 to 2020 period, generated high mean returns, standard deviation, positive skewness, and kurtosis. Robustness tests taking the winsorised returns (deleting the top and bottom 10 percent of returns) produced qualitatively similar results. Further, both the portfolio alpha and beta were extremely high. More so, the Canadian cannabis portfolio garnered excess returns when compared to the Standard and Poor’s Toronto Stock Exchange Composite Index. Money managers, financial analysts, and investors should contemplate including Canadian listed  cannabis stocks based on their high investment return. 

Effort Provision in a Game of Luck

In some jobs, the correlation between effort and output is almost zero. For instance, money managers are primarily paid for luck. Using a controlled lab experiment, we examined under which conditions workers are willing to put in effort even if the output (and thus their employer’s earnings) is determined by pure luck. We varied whether the employer could observe the workers’ effort, as well as whether the employer knows that earnings were determined by luck. We find that, workers believed that the employer will reward their effort even if their effort does not affect earnings. Consequently, workers work harder if the employer could observe their (unproductive) effort. Moreover, even when the employer only saw earnings and not effort, workers labored harder if the employer did not know that earnings were determined by luck.

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST STOCK-PICKING AND MARKET-TIMING: AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH

This paper’s objective is to demystify the world of investing, first by showing and exposing the results the greatest money managers in the Wall Street have obtained over the last years compared to the performance of their benchmark indexes. Index investing represents a passive investment strategy of holding hundreds of stocks instead of the active management approach used by these experts. After exposing said results, a theoretical framework will be presented that explains why money managers have such a difficult time outperforming their benchmark indexes. Later on, a back-test experiment will be presented and thoroughly explained showing five different hypothetical investment scenarios over several 20-year periods with the attempt to quantify the potential benefit of perfectly timing the market and compare it to the cost of waiting for a better time to invest. The results find shows that the cost of waiting is much greater that the potential benefit of perfectly timing the market and the best alternative would be to invest available cash immediately regardless of market or economic outlook.

Why Does Momentum Persist?

The phenomenon of short-term momentum in intriguing because it directly contradicts the notion that in an efficient market stock prices should lack memory. Three classes of possible explanation for momentum are (1) it is consistent with tenets of efficient markets after appropriate risk adjustment; (2) it is consistent with tenets of behavioral finance because of investors' cognitive biases; and (3) it is consistent with structurally-based positive feedback loops. The presence of extreme bubbles provides evidence against the first explanation. The fact that prices are effectively set by institutional investors who are aware of the cognitive biases in question and have a financial incentive to avoid them provides evidence against the second. Structurally-based explanations include the short-term incentives of institutional money managers and the impact of indexing. We believe that considering structural factors affecting the behavior of stock prices provides an additional perspective, to be used in combination with behavioral finance and market efficiency.

A Tracer Study on Business Administration Program Outcomes

Program Outcomes speak to comprehensive explanations that consolidate numerous zones between related information and aptitudes created over the program’s span of broad scope of courses and encounters. This investigation assesses the realization of the Business Administration Program Outcomes for the Year 2015-2019. The respondents were 673 alumni from the University of Cebu- Lapu Lapu and Mandaue. Descriptive survey method was utilized as an examination instrument on snowball sampling. The discoveries uncovered program outcomes that (1) meets the current demand and needs of the industry in the areas of human resource, marketing, accounting, and finance; (2) Communicate and collaborate effectively; and (3) Adhere strictly to professional, ethical standards were realized by the alumni understudies. Program outcomes: (4) Contribute to socio-economic development and environmental sustainability; and (5) Utilizing information technology were less realized. The examination concluded that business management research-based guidelines ought to be actualized and continued. Outcome-Based Teaching and Learning ought to be received to empower understudies to create aptitudes required in the course. Community services spreading business and management development should be adjusted each semester to guarantee maintainability in community vocation programs. Furthermore, Progression of mechanical approach to managing training and learning requests to improved adaption on the new trend and innovations of the money managers and business people.

Do Fund Managers Misestimate Climatic Disaster Risk

We examine whether professional money managers overreact to large climatic disasters. We find that managers within a major disaster region underweight disaster zone stocks to a much greater degree than distant managers and that this aversion to disaster zone stocks is related to a salience bias that decreases over time and distance from the disaster, rather than to superior information possessed by close managers. This overreaction can be costly to fund investors for some especially salient disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes: a long-short strategy that exploits the overreaction generates a significant DGTW-adjusted return over the following 2 years.

Herding in Chile: the case of equity trading in the Chilean pension fund market

The phenomena of ‘herding’ or herd behavior can have important effects when it manifests in equity markets as co-movement in trades of institutional money managers. On one hand, the assetsunder management are so large in comparison with the size of themarket that the trades of these managers affect asset prices, evenmore so if many managers trade in the same direction. On the otherhand, commissions and fees paid by investors are supposedly leviedin exchange for an expert management of the investors’ capital.Thus, a manager that simply imitates the behavior of others does notadd value with her work. The present study is the first to report theresults of two measures of herding used to study this phenomenon inthe equity portions of Chilean AFP (pension) funds. One measure isthe widely used Lakonishok, Vishny y Shleifer (1992) metric, theother is a relatively newer measure presented in Sias (2004). Using adataset of monthly fund trades during the period 2003-2011, bothmeasures find herding in the Chilean market which, while moderatein intensity, is still higher than that reported in the stock markets ofdeveloped countries. More interesting is the asymmetry of results:herding is stronger during times of market crisis, and almostdisappears during periods when the economy expands. These resultshave important implications for performance evaluation and valueadded of the pension funds managed by the AFPs, as well as theimpact of their trades in the stability of the stock market.