Download or read book Essays on Stock Momentum and Asset Liquidity written by Ronnie Sadka and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of my dissertation is to investigate the relation between market frictions, such as liquidity, and expected returns. I focus on the stock momentum anomaly, which cannot be explained by the standard risk-based asset-pricing models to date.

Download or read book Three Essays on Momentum written by Jun Wang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay 1, Growth/Value, Market-Cap, and Momentum, examines the profitability of style momentum strategies on portfolios based on firm growth/value characteristics and market capitalization. We use monthly total returns of nine S & P style indices to avoid concerns about firm size, liquidity, credit risk, short-sale constraints, and transaction costs. We find that historically buying a past best performing style index and short-selling a past worst performing style index generates economically and statistically significant profit of 0.8% per month over the period June 1995 to March 2009. This profitability remains economically plausible after adjusting for systematic risk, short-sale costs, and transaction costs. Investors may actually implement style momentum strategies on exchange traded funds linked to the S & P style indices. Essay 2, Sector Momentum, examines monthly returns of nine Select Sector SPDRs and finds historically buying past outperforming sectors and selling past underperforming sectors produces economically and statistically significant profits. Investors may be able to not only benefit from SPDRs' low fees, tax efficiency, and trading flexibility, but also exploit SPDRs as asset allocation tools to earn excess returns on sector momentum. For robustness checks, I test sector momentum investing strategies on CRSP listed individual stocks between January 1963 and December 2008 using Global Industry Classifications Standard (GICS) and also find statistically significant payoffs. Essay 3, Momentum Strategies on Global ETFs, examines the price momentum on 15 well-diversified iShares MSCI Country Index ETFs from April 1996 to December 2006. I find statistically and economically significant profits for some momentum strategies: long past winners and short past losers. The results are robust to trading costs and excessive risks.

Download or read book Market Momentum written by Stephen Satchell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A one-of-a-kind reference guide covering the behavioral and statistical explanations for market momentum and the implementation of momentum trading strategies Market Momentum: Theory and Practice is a thorough, how-to reference guide for a full range of financial professionals and students. It examines the behavioral and statistical causes of market momentum while also exploring the practical side of implementing related strategies. The phenomenon of momentum in finance occurs when past high returns are followed by subsequent high returns, and past low returns are followed by subsequent low returns. Market Momentum provides a detailed introduction to the financial topic, while examining existing literature. Recent academic and practitioner research is included, offering a more up-to-date perspective. What type of book is Market Momentum and how does it serve a range of readers’ interests and needs? A holistic market momentum guide for industry professionals, asset managers, risk managers, firm managers, plus hedge fund and commodity trading advisors Advanced text to help graduate students in finance, economics, and mathematics further develop their funds management skills Useful resource for financial practitioners who want to implement momentum trading strategies Reference book providing behavioral and statistical explanations for market momentum Due to claims that the phenomenon of momentum goes against the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, behavioral economists have studied the topic in-depth. However, many books published on the subject are written to provide advice on how to make money. In contrast, Market Momentum offers a comprehensive approach to the topic, which makes it a valuable resource for both investment professionals and higher-level finance students. The contributors address momentum theory and practice, while also offering trading strategies that practitioners can study.

Download or read book Essays on Liquidity and Stock Returns written by Sai-Pang Chan and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Quantitative Momentum written by Wesley R. Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The individual investor's comprehensive guide to momentum investing Quantitative Momentum brings momentum investing out of Wall Street and into the hands of individual investors. In his last book, Quantitative Value, author Wes Gray brought systematic value strategy from the hedge funds to the masses; in this book, he does the same for momentum investing, the system that has been shown to beat the market and regularly enriches the coffers of Wall Street's most sophisticated investors. First, you'll learn what momentum investing is not: it's not 'growth' investing, nor is it an esoteric academic concept. You may have seen it used for asset allocation, but this book details the ways in which momentum stands on its own as a stock selection strategy, and gives you the expert insight you need to make it work for you. You'll dig into its behavioral psychology roots, and discover the key tactics that are bringing both institutional and individual investors flocking into the momentum fold. Systematic investment strategies always seem to look good on paper, but many fall down in practice. Momentum investing is one of the few systematic strategies with legs, withstanding the test of time and the rigor of academic investigation. This book provides invaluable guidance on constructing your own momentum strategy from the ground up. Learn what momentum is and is not Discover how momentum can beat the market Take momentum beyond asset allocation into stock selection Access the tools that ease DIY implementation The large Wall Street hedge funds tend to portray themselves as the sophisticated elite, but momentum investing allows you to 'borrow' one of their top strategies to enrich your own portfolio. Quantitative Momentum is the individual investor's guide to boosting market success with a robust momentum strategy.

Download or read book Essays in International Asset Pricing written by Ying Wu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The empirical research focuses on the common risk factors in stock returns and trading activities. The first essay is titled "Asset Pricing with Extreme Liquidity Risk". Defining extreme liquidity as the tails of illiquidity for all stocks, I propose a direct measure of market-wide extreme liquidity risk and find that extreme liquidity risk is priced cross-sectionally in the U.S. equity market. From 1973 through 2011, stocks in the highest quintile of extreme liquidity risk loadings earned value-weighted average returns 6.6% per year higher than stocks in the lowest quintile. The extreme liquidity risk premium is robust to common risk factors related to size, value and momentum. The premium is different from that on aggregate liquidity risk documented in Pástor and Stambaugh (2003) as well as that based on tail risk of Kelly (2011). Extreme liquidity estimates can offer a warning sign of extreme liquidity events. Predictive regressions show that extreme liquidity measure reliably outperforms aggregate liquidity measures in predicting future market returns. Finally, I incorporate the extreme liquidity risk into Acharya and Pedersen's (2005) framework and find new supporting evidence for their liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model. The second essay is co-authored with Prof. Andrew Karolyi. We have developed a multi-factor returns-generating model for an international setting that captures how restrictions on investability or accessibility can matter. The model works reasonably well in a wide variety of settings. More specifically, using monthly returns for over 37,000 stocks from 46 developed and emerging market countries over a two-decade period, we propose and test a multi-factor model that includes factor portfolios based on firm characteristics and that builds separate factors comprised of globally-accessible stocks, which we call "global factors," and of locally-accessible stocks, which we call "local factors." Our new "hybrid" multi-factor model with both global and local factors not only captures strong common variation in global stock returns, but also achieves low pricing errors and rejection rates using conventional testing procedures for a variety of regional and global test asset portfolios formed on size, value, and momentum. In the third essay, I examine the implications of the Lo and Wang (2000, 2006) mutual fund separation model in the cross-sectional behavior of global trading activity. It demonstrates that return-based factors work poorly around the world. On average across countries, market-wide turnover captures 37% of all systematic turnover components in individual stock trading, and two additional Fama and French (1993) factor turnovers increase the explanatory power by 23%. Similarly Lo and Wang's (2000) turnovers only capture on average 64% of all systematic turnover components. Using this multi-factor asset pricing-trading framework, a horserace is further performed to explore other factors in return by examining the turnover behavior of different factor mimicking portfolios. All the return-based factors capture at most 67% of the common variation in trading, suggesting that stock pricing and trading volume may not be compatible around the world. In cross-country analysis, the explanatory power of the returnbased factor model varies substantially across countries and markets, with better performance for European developed markets and China. Surprisingly, in North America, Japan and most emerging markets there are larger amounts of commonality in trading, mostly higher than 47 %, for reasons other than return motive.

Download or read book Two Essays on Stock Liquidity written by Shuming Liu (doctor of finance.) and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two empirical essays on investor behavior and liquidity variation. The results demonstrate the important role of investors in affecting liquidity. The first essay examines how the fluctuation in the aggregate stock market liquidity is related to investor sentiment. I find that the stock market is more liquid when investor sentiment is higher. This evidence is consistent with the theoretical prediction that higher investor sentiment increases stock market liquidity. The second essay investigates whether the cross-sectional differences in liquidity are affected by institutional ownership. I document that stocks with larger increases in the number of institutional investors are more liquid than other stocks. This result is consistent with the prediction that information competition among institutional investors increases stock liquidity.

Download or read book Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets written by Christoph Koser and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of liquidity in financial markets. Relying on the latest proxies for liquidity and TAQ benchmark data, this dissertation investigates liquidity in financial markets from different perspectives and gives answers to crucial challenges when assessing the importance of liquidity; its time-varying commonality across assets and stock markets; its impact on asset pricing in abnormal market states and finally its dynamics and determinants on a daily basis. This study has implications for investors and market makers as part of risk management and portfolio diversification and for policy makers in the context of designing optimal regulatory frameworks to predict and prevent common sources of liquidity tightness in global financial markets. In the second chapter, I study commonality in liquidity and its association to market volatility. Taking on a global perspective on this matter and examining nine major stock markets, I first construct a novel and dynamic measure of commonality in liquidity. I show that liquidity commonality is present in global stock markets and increases parallel to crisis periods. This finding points towards abrupt changes in liquidity fundamentals and clearly provide evidence for demand- and supply-driven sources of commonality in liquidity (i.e. correlated trading behavior on institutional level paired with restrictions on funding capital) on a global scale. Driven by the well acknowledged findings of a positive relationship between volatility and illiquidity, I investigate the time-varying tie between common variation in liquidity and volatility. Using a dynamic granger-causality test, I find that global market volatility always causes commonality in liquidity while commonality in liquidity causes volatility only in sub-periods, spanning over the financial crisis and its aftermath period. In the third chapter, I examine the effect of systemic liquidity risk as a priced risk factor in asset pricing. Hereby, I challenge the previous literature in their finding of a linear relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset prices. I show that systemic liquidity risk is not always a priced factor in the explanation of asset prices. I find that systemic liquidity risk and asset prices are negatively associated in bad market states. This finding can be explained by downward trended liquidity spirals, in other words, an interaction between demand and supply-sided commonality in liquidity, which cause a depression in asset pricing during bad market states. I also show that liquidity risk has a positive link to asset pricing in good market states, which is mainly associated with search-for-yield considerations. Finally, I document that there is no significant relationship between systemic liquidity risk and asset pricing during normal market swings. This finding supports the initial claim that market participants do not worry too much about the state of market-wide liquidity during regular times. In the fourth chapter, I investigate daily liquidity and trading activity of energy stocks traded at U.S. stock exchanges, categorized into five energy sectors, that is, oil and gas, coal mining, renewables, electric- and multi-utilities. Using TAQ (trades and quotes) data, I examine various dimensions of liquidity and trading - effective spreads, price impact of trades, number of trades and volume - on sectoral level. I document cross-sectional differences in the level of liquidity and trading across energy stock segments. I find that liquidity and trading is trended and exhibit serial dependency up to higher lags, similarly across sectors. There is a weekly pattern for trading and liquidity, both decline on Fridays, on average. I also identify a number of factors that affect trading and liquidity commonly across sectors, that is, general market movements, short-term momentum runs and overall stock market volatility, which points again towards the direction of correlated trading, amplified by institutional investors. Moreover, I show that trading and liquidity are sensitive to a widening Term Spread. I find a heterogeneous effect of the oil price on liquidity and trading activity, dependent on the energy segment. Despite controlling for stock market volatility, I observe that illiquidity and trading increase with higher levels of oil price volatility. Finally, I show that trading activity, both, in number of trade executions and share volume, increases for renewable and multi-utility stocks when climate change receives global media attention. Fast markets and increased trading make liquidity to be one of the top considerations in the smooth functioning of financial markets, especially in the light of financial distress and sudden, downward trended liquidity spirals, where liquidity adjusts to different equilibria levels. For future discussion, there is further need to address liquidity in its different dimensions and in the context of financial market quality, information efficiency and sentiment. This dissertation is yet another step for a more comprehensive knowledge on liquidity." -- TDX.

Download or read book Three Essays on Liquidity Shocks and Their Implication for Asset Pricing and Valuation Models written by Nardos M. Beyene and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main objective of my three essays is to incorporate liquidity shocks and the linkages between the liquidity condition of financial markets into asset pricing and valuation models. The first essay focuses on the liquidity adjusted capital asset pricing model, while the second and the third essays examine the popular asset valuation model called the Fed model. The first essay investigates the pricing of the commonality risk in the U.S. stock market by using a more comprehensive market illiquidity measure that can reflect the liquidity condition of different asset markets. This measure is given by the yield difference between commercial paper and treasury bill. In addition, consistent with the definition of commonality risk, I form portfolios based on the sensitivity of each stock's illiquidity to the market-wide illiquidity. Using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2016 and the conditional version of the Liquidity-adjusted Capital Asset Pricing Model (LCAPM) estimated by the Dynamic Conditional Correlation approach, I find a significant commonality risk premium of 0.022% and 0.014% per year for 12-month and 24-month holding periods, respectively. This premium estimate is significantly higher than those found using the market illiquidity measure and estimation procedures from previous studies. These findings provide evidence that a security's easiness in terms of tradability at times of liquidity dry up is extremely important. It is also higher than the excess return associated with other forms of liquidity risk. In addition, the paper finds a variation in the estimated commonality risk premium over time, with values being higher during periods of market turmoil. Moreover, estimating the LCAPM with the yield difference between commercial paper and treasury bill as a measure of market illiquidity performs better in predicting returns for the low commonality risk portfolios. The second essay examines the inflation illusion hypothesis in explaining the high correlation between government bond yield and stock yield as implied by the Fed model. According to the inflation illusion hypothesis, there is mis-pricing in the stock market due to the failure of investors to adjust their cash flow expectation to inflation. This led to a co-movement in stock yield and government bond yield. I use the Gordon Growth model to determine the mis-pricing component in the stock market. In the next step, the correlation between bond yield and stock yield is estimated using the Asymmetric Generalized Dynamic Conditional Correlation (AG-DCC) model. Finally, I regress this correlation on mis-pricing and two other control variables, GDP and inflation. I use monthly data from January 1983 to December 2016. Consistent with the Fed model, the paper finds a significant positive correlation between the yield on government bonds and stock yield, with an average correlation of 0.942 - 0.997. However, in contrast to the inflation illusion hypothesis, mis-pricing in the stock market has an insignificant impact on this correlation. The third essay provides liquidity shocks contagion between the stock market and the corporate bond market as the driving force behind the high correlation between the yield on stocks and the yield on government bonds as implied by the Fed model. The idea is that when liquidity drops in the stock market, firms' credit risk rises because the deterioration in the liquidity of equities traded in the stock market increases the firms' default probability. Consequently, investors' preferences shift away from corporate bonds to government bonds. Higher demand for government bonds keeps their yield low, leading to a co-movement of government bond yield and stock yield. In order to test this liquidity-based explanation, the paper first examines the interdependence between liquidity in the stock and corporate bond markets using the Markov switching model, and a time series non-parametric technique called the Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM). In order to see the response of government bond yield and stock yield to liquidity shocks in the stock market, the study implements an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. Using monthly data from January 1997 to December 2016, the paper presents strong evidence of liquidity shocks transmission form the stock market to the corporate bond market. Furthermore, liquidity shocks in the stock market are found to have a significant impact on the stock yield. These findings support the illiquidity contagion explanation provided in this paper.

Download or read book Three Essays in Asset Pricing written by Alan Picard and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays. My first paper re-examines the link between idiosyncratic risk and expected returns for a large sample of firms in both developed and emerging markets. Recent studies using Fama-French three factor models have shown a negative relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns for developed markets. This relationship has not been studied to date for emerging markets. This study relates the current-month’s idiosyncratic volatility to the subsequent month’s returns for a sample of both developed and emerging markets expanding benchmark factors by including both a momentum and a systematic liquidity risk component. My second essay contributes to the important literature on the topic of the small capitalization stocks historical outperformance over large capitalization stocks by investigating the hypothesis that the small firm premium is related to macroeconomic and financial variables and that relationship is driven by the economic cycle in the United States and Canada. More specifically, this study employs recent advances in nonlinear time series models to explore the relationship between the small firm premium, and financial and macroeconomic variables in the Canadian and U.S. economies. My third paper re-examines the findings of a recent research paper that suggested that market wide liquidity may act as a leading indicator to the economic cycle. Using several liquidity measures and various macroeconomic variables to proxy for the economic conditions, the paper presents evidence that stock market liquidity could forecast business cycles: A major decrease in the overall level of market liquidity could indicate weak economic growth in the subsequent months. However, the drawback in the analysis is that the relationship is investigated in a linear approach even though it has been proven that most macroeconomic variables follow non-linear dynamics. Employing similar liquidity measures and macroeconomic proxies, and two popular econometrics models that account for non-linear behavior, this study hence re-investigates the relationship between stock market liquidity and business cycles.

Download or read book Two Essays on Momentum written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most controversial topics in recent investment literature has been stock return momentum. If an investor buys past winners and sells past losers, he will earn positive profits in the intermediate-term horizon (3 to 12 months). While behavioral theories seem to dominate as an explanation for the momentum phenomenon since momentum has been regarded as direct counter evidence for the efficient market hypothesis, Chordia and Shivakumar (2002) find that momentum can be explained by a set of macroeconomic variables. Chordia and Shivakumar argue that momentum is caused by time-varying expected returns that can be predicted by a set of macroeconomic variables, which might be associated with time-varying risk. However, the first essay of my dissertation shows that even if the macroeconomic variables are independent of stock returns, they can appear to predict momentum profits if they exhibit high persistence and the momentum portfolio period overlaps with the parameter estimation period. I am able to produce results similar to those of Chordia and Shivakumar with randomly generated variables, while I show that once the parameter estimation periods are changed, the predictive power of the macroeconomic variables for momentum disappear. My results provide evidence that the predictive power of the macroeconomic variables comes from a spurious relation between stock returns during the momentum portfolio formation period and predicted returns from the macroeconomic variables. My results further suggest that Chordia and Shivakumar's argument that the predictive power of macroeconomic variables for momentum is a challenge to behavioral theories is indeed premature. The second essay shows that the ratio of the 50-day moving average to the 200-day moving average has significant predictive power for future returns. Stocks with a high moving average ratio tend to outperform stocks with a low moving average ratio for the next six months. This predictive power is distinct from that of the nearness of the current price to the 52-week high, which was first documented by George and Hwang (2004). The moving average ratio, combined with the nearness to the 52-week high, can explain most of the intermediate-term momentum profits. This suggests that an anchoring bias in which investors use moving averages and the 52-week high as their reference points for estimating fundamental values is the main source of momentum effects. Momentum profits caused by the anchoring bias do not disappear in the long-run, confirming George and Hwang's argument that intermediate-term momentum and long-term reversals are separate phenomena.

Download or read book Three Essays on Stock Market Liquidity and Earnings Seasons written by Andrei I. Nikiforov and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, I identify the effects of earnings seasons (i.e., the clustering of earnings releases), on stock market liquidity and asset pricing. In the first essay, I document strong seasonal regularities associated with aggregate earnings announcements. Applying the large body of literature linking earnings announcements to liquidity effects, I argue that these earnings seasons create market-wide liquidity shocks and I show that both liquidity betas and liquidity risk change during earnings seasons In the second essay, I test the impact of earnings seasons on commonality in liquidity as measured by both spreads and depths. I find that commonality significantly decreases during the four weeks of each calendar quarter when most companies release their earnings. These findings contribute to the literature by identifying and examining the clustering effect of firm-specific information on commonality in liquidity. In the third essay, I extend the study of the liquidity effects of earnings seasons to a sample of 20 countries. I find that the international data corroborate both hypotheses. I also find that the aggregate quality of accounting information, and the duration and frequency of interim reporting periods are important determinants of the liquidity effects (both liquidity betas and commonality in liquidity) during earnings seasons.

Download or read book Three Essays on Empirical Asset Pricing written by Wenqing Wang and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Liquidity of U S Common Stocks written by Shalini Nageswaran and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, I find that stock characteristics do predict a stock's time-varying liquidity beta, i.e. its sensitivity to market, with the effect varying according to the assumed holding period using data on 30 small, medium, and large cap stocks between 1997 and 2002. I also find that liquidity is a priced factor for stock return even after controlling for market and stock measures of risk such as estimates of market volatility and stock level volatility. In order to mitigate problems arising from a small panel, I also test the returns model with ARCH errors on a larger sample of 2000 stocks. Chapter 2 accounts for endogenous liquidity in a standard asset pricing model. Loss of liquidity, especially during times of crises, needs to be incorporated into models of financial assets so as to forecast returns correctly. To identify the effect of endogenous stock liquidity on stock returns, an instrument is constructed from the NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ's decimalization program, which shrunk tick sizes from one-sixteenth of a dollar to one-hundredth of a dollar. Decimalization led to an increase in liquidity by allowing for narrower bid-ask spreads. Using daily price and quote data on U.S. common stocks, I find that as stocks becomes more illiquid, their future expected returns increase. In Chapter 3, I propose two related measures for algorithmic trading constructed from the Disclosure of Order Execution Statistics data in order to study the effect of algorithmic trading on stock liquidity. The first is the average time taken to fill an order once it arrives in the market, known as fill time, and the second is the proportion of orders executed within ten seconds of order arrival at the NYSE. Since the decision to use algorithms in trading is an endogenous one, I use the NYSE's introduction of autoquotes in 2003 to identify the causal effect of algorithmic trading on a stock's liquidity. Using IV estimation, I find that a one second decrease in fill time narrows spreads by two basis points.

Download or read book Essays on the Trading Behavior of Mutual Fund Managers written by Gjergji Cici and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Liquidity in Financial Markets written by John Brendan McDermott and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book TrimTabs Investing written by Charles Biderman and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2005-04-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether you are an investment professional managing billions of dollars or an individual investor with a small nest egg, TrimTabs Investing shows you how to beat the major stock market averages with less risk. This groundbreaking book begins by comparing the stock market to a casino in which the house (public companies and the insiders who run them) buys and sells shares with the players (institutional and individual investors). TrimTabs Investing argues that stock prices are primarily a function of liquidity—the amount of shares available for purchase and the amount of money available to buy them—rather than fundamental value. Finally, it outlines the building blocks of liquidity theory and explains how you can use them to predict the direction of the stock market. “Charles Biderman, a savvy and battle-scarred veteran of the investment wars, has fashioned an intriguing approach to making money in the stock market that adroitly avoids both heavy-breathing speculation and the standard Wall Street practices that enable investors, big and small, to lose money in good markets as well as bad. Aimed at the sophisticated investor (which may or may not be an oxymoron), the book is written in blessedly straightforward prose and is a worthwhile read for anyone with an urge to have a fling at investing.--Alan Abelson Barron’s “Since the days of Joseph and Pharaoh, it has been axiomatic that the size of the grain harvest affects the level of grain prices; but today’s investors have been slow to appreciate the fact that the supply of stock shares significantly determines the level of stock prices. Biderman’s long overdue book outlines the theory and evidence behind ‘Trading Float,’ the actual—and exploitable—power behind major moves in the stock market. --Paul Montgomery CEO and CIO of Montgomery Capital Management “‘Trade as corporate execs do, not as they say.’ Charles Biderman has built an impressive list of hedge fund clients from this essential insight, and this book does a great job explaining exactly how retail investors can incorporate it into their investing.”--Eric Zitzewitz Assistant Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business “Charles Biderman is a smart thinker, clear writer—and he offers here some very interesting ideas. This book is for the little guy who enjoys reading about money and economics, even if he doesn’t adopt the strategies offered here; and for the professional or sophisticated investor, who, to a greater or lesser degree, just might.--Andrew Tobias author of The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need