abstract: When managers provide earnings guidance, analysts normally respond within a short time frame with their own earnings forecasts. Within this setting, I investigate whether financial analysts use publicly available information to adjust for predictable error in management guidance and, if so, the explanation for such inefficiency. I provide evidence that analysts do not fully adjust for predictable guidance error when revising forecasts. The analyst inefficiency is attributed to analysts' attempts to advance relationship with the managers, analysts' compensation not tie to forecast accuracy, and their forecasting ability. Finally, the stock market acts as if it does not fully realize that analysts respond inefficiently to the guidance, introducing mispricing. This mispricing is not fully corrected upon earnings announcement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Accountancy 2012

Investors rely on secondary information sources, like cover stories, as market indicators due to time, information and resources constraints. However, studies in the US market gave mixed results about the potential use of cover stories while no publish research could be found in South Africa related to investors reaction to cover stories or whether an understanding of investment periods, company specific characteristics or bounded rational behaviour would yield superior abnormal returns from cover stories.In total, 1218 cover stories related to publicily listed companies were recorded from FinWeek and Financial Mail for the period 1985 to 2008 and categorised based on the Likert scale developed by Arnold et al. (2007). Event study methodology was used in the research.The research found evidence that investors did pay attention to very optimistic cover stories. Positive an neutral cover stories were contrarian indicators, while negative cover stories were momentum indicators of future company investment performances and the abnormal returns for an investment portfolio based on these cover story effects were optimised by short-selling cover story companies from healthcare, general retail and general mining industries and buying shares in control companies from the same industries and company sizes. The ability to earn long-term abnormal returns proofed weak form market inefficiency for the JSE. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has been the central assumption of financial modelling in the previous decades. At its core, it is a statement about the efficient incorporation of available information in the prices of assets, rendering each price a 'true' representation of the asset's intrinsic value. The notion of informationally efficient financial markets has been, since its formulation, entrenched in the very core of our understanding of how asset pricing works, yet, with ever so increasing frequency, when subjected to empirical scrutiny, it fails to prove its explanatory and predictive prowess. New academic strands emerged have emerged as a result, attempting to explain those empirical short-comings, with rather mixed results. The new models and theories often either explain a singular anomaly, rather than pro- viding a generalized and consistent theoretical framework, or are exclusive with the general state of financial markets, which tends to be efficient and rational. This thesis shall explore the relationship of information and financial mar- kets, taking into account developments that have occurred since the inception of the EMH. Subsequently it will present a new theoretical model for asset pric- ing and ipso facto the efficiency of financial markets, based on meta-analysis of information, along...

Submitted by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2012-11-27T12:55:43Z No. of bitstreams: 1 1424220.pdf: 301206 bytes, checksum: 1f4091e3ffd5fc7ee179deb76ab824b1 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2012-11-27T12:55:59Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 1424220.pdf: 301206 bytes, checksum: 1f4091e3ffd5fc7ee179deb76ab824b1 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2012-11-27T12:56:10Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 1424220.pdf: 301206 bytes, checksum: 1f4091e3ffd5fc7ee179deb76ab824b1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2012-11-27T12:56:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1424220.pdf: 301206 bytes, checksum: 1f4091e3ffd5fc7ee179deb76ab824b1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Aparentemente existe uma anomalia no mercado de ações, onde é possível prever excessos de retomo das ações baseando-se em dados passados de divulgação de lucro. Este fenômeno é estatisticamente significante e parece não ser um artefato de amostragem ou metodologia, mas de uma ineficiência de mercado. Estudos mostram uma tendência dos excessos de retornos acumulados das ações se movimentarem na direção da surpresa de lucro, e este movimento se estende por meses após a data de divulgação de lucro trimestral. Neste trabalho mostro que este fenômeno ocorre também no Brasil, mesmo utilizando uma amostra com especificidades do mercado brasileiro e utilizando dados de expectativas de lucro de analistas financeiros no lugar de previsão estatística. / Apparently, there is an anomaly in the stock market that shows that is possible to predict abnormal returns from stocks based on past earnings announcements. This phenomenon is statistical1y significant and appears not to be an artifact of sample or methodologies, but from a market inefficiency. Studies demonstrate a tendency towards accumulated abnormal retums to move toward the direction of the earnings surprise and this movement continues to weeks and even months. This study illustrates that this phenomenon also occurs in Brazil, even using a sample with Brazilian market specifications and using eamings expectations from financiaI analysts in place of statistical forecasts.

Paper [I] tests the success rate of trades and the returns of the Opening Range Breakout (ORB) strategy. A trader that trades on the ORB strategy seeks to identify large intraday price movements and trades only when the price moves beyond some predetermined threshold. We present an ORB strategy based on normally distributed returns to identify such days and find that our ORB trading strategy result in significantly higher returns than zero as well as an increased success rate in relation to a fair game. The characteristics of such an approach over conventional statistical tests is that it involves the joint distribution of low, high, open and close over a given time horizon. Paper [II] measures the returns of a popular day trading strategy, the Opening Range Breakout strategy (ORB), across volatility states. We calculate the average daily returns of the ORB strategy for each volatility state of the underlying asset when applied on long time series of crude oil and S&P 500 futures contracts. We find an average difference in returns between the highest and the lowest volatility state of around 200 basis points per day for crude oil, and of around 150 basis points per day for the S&P 500. This finding suggests that the success in day trading can depend to a large extent on the volatility of the underlying asset. Paper [III] performs empirical analysis on short-term and long-term Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) strategies regarding their exposures to unanticipated risk shocks. Previous research documents that CTA strategies offer diversification opportunities during equity market crisis situations when evaluated as a group, but do not separate between short-term and long-term CTA strategies. When separating between short-term and long-term CTA strategies, this paper finds that only short-term CTA strategies provide a significant, and consistent, exposure to unanticipated risk shocks while long-term CTA strategies do not. For the purpose of diversifying a portfolio during equity market crisis situations, this result suggests that an investor should allocate to short-term CTA strategies rather than to long-term CTA strategies.