Short Selling – On Ethics, Politics, and Culture

Lawyers and economists do not always speak the same language. Where economists present crisp and clear numbers, lawyers get lost in lengthy discussions about fairness and justice. Or so it seems. Arguably, the regulation of short selling illustrates a worrying clash of cultures. Economists understand short selling as a value-free market mechanism while (not only) lawyers suspect a profit, unfairly gained at the expense of others: “Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also cause it”. In what follows, we address implications of this culture clash in the realm of ethics and politics. We conclude with a hypothesis, submitting that there might be traces of another clash to be observed when comparing regulatory cultures across countries. A preliminary look at data seems to suggest that short sale bans are less common in countries with a strong capital-market tradition and more common for countries which are newer to this game. If this holds true, important lessons are to be learned for the European Commission’s plan to set up a capital market union.

QUADRATIC PROGRAMMING: AN OPTIMIZATION TOOL FOR BUILDING GLOBAL MINIMUM VARIANCE PORTFOLIO WITH NO SHORT SALE

Quantitative method in portfolio selection is a fascinating issue to make a decision in investment. Portfolio optimization is a very important to manage investment risk. There are many papers dealing with the Markowitz portfolio model, but not all of the papers studied about positive weight portfolio or no short sale constrained portfolio. Positive weight portfolio describes that short sale is allowed for the investor. While, short sale is banned in a certain economic condition due to its ability in decreasing stock market index. Besides, Islamic capital market does not allow speculative transaction such as short selling. Hence, portfolio with no short sale constraint is needed. This study aims to build Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMVP) with no short sale constraint. The GMVP with positive asset allocation based on Markowitz model can be built by using quadratic programming with interior point method. The main theory applied in this research is Markowitz portfolio optimization model. Mean and variance of stocks closing price are two things that should be considered in this model. The result shows that the positive weight of GMVP includes 0% of ADRO shares; 2, 65% of ANTM shares; 0% of CTRA shares; 30,27% of EXCL shares; 37,21% of ICBP shares; 3,37% of INCO shares; 13,89% of KLBF shares; 0% of PGAS shares; and 12,61% of PTBA shares.

Dynamic Asset Pricing with Interactions between Short-Sale and Borrowing Constraints

This paper studies the joint effect of borrowing and short-sale constraints under heterogeneous beliefs and risk aversions. Although the constraints never simultaneously bind in equilibrium, interesting economics emerge in the anticipatory effects of potentially future binding constraints. In particular, the risk-free rate and Sharpe ratio experience endogenous jumps at a critical state, where two equilibria coexist. Moreover, a short-sale ban can lead to a lower stock price and higher volatility depending on the relative tightness between the constraints, and tightening the borrowing constraint during a short-sale ban can also make returns more volatile.

The effect of sentiment on commercial real estate returns: investor and occupier perspectives

PurposeReal estate is an asset that is traded in highly segmented, illiquid and informationally inefficient local markets. A short sale in real estate is almost infeasible and therefore impedes informed rational arbitrageurs to trade against mispricing. Thus, real estate returns are prone to sentiment-driven behaviours. Will the impacts on asset returns be identical for different types of sentiment?Design/methodology/approachThis study argues that not all sentiment effects are created equal. Using the bounds test of the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models, this paper examines how occupier sentiment versus investor sentiment contributes to the short-run and long-run dynamics of commercial real estate returns in Australia.FindingsThe empirical evidence suggests that investor sentiment and occupier sentiment influence return asymmetrically after macroeconomic conditions are controlled for.Practical implicationsThe sectoral analysis further reveals that sector-specific sentiment plays a significant role in explaining commercial real estate returns. Furthermore, notable improvement is found in producing more accurate prediction in returns, given that measures of occupier and investor sentiment are appropriately specified in the forecast.Originality/valueThis study is novel in the sense that it acknowledges the impacts of occupiers' and investors' sentiment may be fundamentally different. The unique innovation and contribution of this study to behavioural finance literature are based on a new dataset from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors which includes a survey-based measure of investor sentiment and occupier sentiment.