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We examine how the peer effects arising not only from the leading firm but also from a slightly better performing firm affect the capital structure decisions of a firm. There is a large body of literature documenting the importance of peer effects, but it is unclear whether managers pay close attention to activities of slightly better performers. This study uses both book‐ and market‐value based approaches to estimate the peer effect measures. Our analysis shows that: (1) our peer effect measures induce the convergence of the follower firms' capital structure towards better performing firms; and (2) the capital structure converges more towards a slightly better performer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine what the optimal time is in a typical trading day for investors to buy/sell stocks in the Australian stock market. Design/methodology/approach: The study mainly focuses on the S&P/ASX200. Each trading day, between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., is divided into 30-min blocks. The effectiveness of easily implementable trading strategy to purchase the index in the morning and sell at the close is tested. The study controls for the excess overnight price volatility to improve the effectiveness of the investment strategy. This trading strategy is compared against other 66 possible day-trading combinations. Findings: The results show that the trading strategy of buying in the first 30 min of the trading session and close off the position during the last 30 min obtains higher returns than other 66 strategies. Practical implications: The day-trading strategy proposed in this study is very simple and therefore can be easily implemented by investors including individual investors. Originality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which constructs a trading strategy using the J- or U-shaped intraday return pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on energy commodities, industrial metals, and gold, this paper examines the degree to which commodity futures returns depend on news sentiment under various market conditions, and the structure of that dependence. We observe an asymmetric market reaction to positive and negative news sentiment, which changes in periods of financial turmoil. The quantile regression analysis shows that news sentiment's influence on the futures returns follows an upward trend at higher percentiles. This structure flattens for positive news during the global financial crisis, while the slope for the negative component steepens in backwardation periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relationship between convenience yield and relative scarcity in the non-ferrous metal market for the period January 2000–March 2015. We identify various sets of economic relationships for six major base metals, namely, aluminium, copper, lead, nickel, tin and zinc. Our bivariate and multivariate VARs and associated Granger-causality test results generally support the existence of a positive relationship between convenience yields of base metals and our relative scarcity measure. Furthermore, the time-varying characteristics observed in the results, especially during contango and backwardation periods, provide useful information to market players in developing inventory strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose that an options-based approach is a superior alternative to the traditional cost-of-carry method to model both the behaviour of convenience yields and the commodity price responses to changes in inventory levels. This approach is shown to be more robust and avoids the simplifying assumptions embedded in cost-of-carry valuation which fully accounts for the non-negativity constraint on inventory. Unlike the cost-of-carry approach, the options-based approach does not treat the convenience yield as an exogenous factor. This offers a more natural measure of implied convenience yields in commodity trading strategies. We test the relationship between convenience yields and inventory levels for a number of liquidly traded base metals using both methods. Our results show that the relationship between convenience yields and inventory levels is strongly defined under the options-based approach in line with market beliefs. This result is consistent with other studies that have used the options-based approach in other nonmetals commodity markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]