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The efficient market hypothesis—like the
random walk
hypothesis it grew out of—is not so much a
hypothesis as it is a model for how markets perform. As a model, it
applies to some markets more than others. A market is said to be
efficient if prices in that
market reflect all available information.
Suppose you hear that a firm has just announced
quarterly earnings that exceed analysts' predictions. You rush to buy
the stock but find its price has already risen two dollars from the
previous day's close. Are you too late? Might the price continue to rise
on the positive news, or has the market overreacted? Perhaps you
should sell short instead of buying? The efficient market hypothesis
says these questions are mute—that whatever information you consider in
making a decision has already been incorporated into prices and is
useless for predicting future prices of the stock. Market efficiency renders speculative trading pointless. We will elaborate on this
shortly, but let's first consider some background.
The random walk hypothesis of the early 1960s was an
empirical result. Based on
time-series analyses of price series,
researchers concluded that the price series behaved like
geometric
random walks. This threw cold water on the practice of technical
analysis, suggesting the predictive price patterns technicians divined
from price charts were only figments of their imagination. However, the
absence of predictive price patterns does not mean that prices cannot be
predicted using other information. It ruled out technical analysis but
not fundamental analysis.
Some of the literature supporting the random walk
hypothesis—especially Alfred Cowles' work—did seem to discredit
fundamental analysis as well. Rather than study time series of prices, Cowles
studied the performance of investment managers and investment
newsletters. Presumably, these employed a variety of analytic techniques to
make stock picks. Their collective poor performance cast doubt, not
only on technical analysis, but on all means of speculative trading. In
the late 1960s and early 1970s, Eugene Fama's efficient market hypothesis
extended the random walk hypothesis to throw cold water on all forms of
analysis employed by speculative traders.
Fama had helped pay his way through college by working
for professor Harry Ernst, who published a newsletter recommending stock
picks based on technical analysis. He gave Fama the job of studying past prices
to identify profitable trading systems. Identifying systems that
performed well on the historical data was easy, but they routinely
failed when implemented. Fama was learning for himself what is widely
know to professional investors—that data mining can produce all sorts of
trading systems that work beautifully on the data from which they are
derived but are worthless otherwise.
Fama took these experiences with him to the University
of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in finance. His thesis was published
in the Journal of Business in 1965 as the "Behavior of Stock
Market Prices." This elaborated on the random walk hypothesis,
fleshing out other researchers' justification for why prices should
follow a random walk. It reported on Fama's own empirical studies of
past price data. Advances in computers had made it possible for him to
perform more elaborate studies than earlier researchers. Fama also
looked at flaws in the random walk hypothesis, focusing especially on
the issue of market leptokurtosis. His overall conclusions were
dismal for market technicians. The random walk hypothesis was an
excellent model for the markets, and whatever flaws it might have, they
weren't anything that would present market technicians with trading
opportunities.
Although Fama's paper was about the random walk
hypothesis, it is notable for introducing
the term "efficient market" and anticipating the efficient market
hypothesis: [1]
... a situation where successive price changes are
independent is consistent with the existence of an "efficient"
market for securities, that is, a market where, given the available
information, actual prices at every point in time represent very good
estimates of intrinsic values ...
In an abbreviated version of his paper, which Fama (1965)
wrote for the practitioner-oriented Financial Analysts Journal,
he elaborated: [2]
An "efficient" market is defined as a market where
there are large numbers of rational, profit-maximizers actively
competing, with each trying to predict future market values of
individual securities, and where important current information is almost
freely available to all participants ... on the average, competition
will cause the full effects of new information on intrinsic values to be
reflected "instantaneously" in actual prices.
But he still held out hope for fundamental analysts:
[3]
... the existence of many sophisticated analysts helps
make the market more efficient which in turn implies a market which
conforms more closely to the random walk model. Although the returns to
these sophisticated analysts may be quite high, they establish a market
in which fundamental analysis is a fairly useless procedure both for the
average analyst and the average investor.
This was just so much theory, unsupported by empirical
facts. Fama's empirical work had exclusively looked at time series of
prices, and a study of fundamental analysis would likely need to
look at investment managers' performance or study stock price movements
following announcements, such as stock splits or earnings
announcements. In 1965, the scant
research along such lines—Cowles (1933), Friend et al (1962)
and Horowitz (1963) studied investment managers' performance—had found
no evidence of sophisticated analysts earning
"quite high" returns.
Between 1965 and 1970, many empirical studies were
performed on stock price behavior or investment managers' performance. These culminated in
1970 with Fama's second landmark
paper, which appeared in the Journal of Finance and was titled "Efficient capital
markets: A review of theory and empirical work." In it, Fama
elaborated on his
theory of efficient markets and reviewed the developing literature. Based on the terminology of his colleague Harry Roberts,
he reported on empirical tests for three different levels of market efficiency:
A
market has weak efficiency if prices fully reflect any information
contained in past price data. Weak efficiency rejects technical
analysis. It is essentially the random walk hypothesis but without as
full a characterization of the
stochastic process that describes price
behavior.
A
market has semi-strong efficiency if prices fully reflect all
readily-available public information—past prices, economic news,
earnings reports, etc. Tests of semi-strong efficiency are
those that study stock price movements following announcements, such
as stock splits or earnings announcements.
A
market has strong efficiency if prices fully reflect all public and
privileged information. Privileged information includes knowledge
available to a market maker, insider
information available to corporate managers, or information that
investment managers invest time and effort to compile for their own use.
Fama's 1965 paper had explored the random walk
hypothesis, and there was nothing unexpected to report in 1970.
Empirical studies of the random walk hypothesis strongly supported weak
market efficiency.
Empirical studies of semi-strong or strong market
efficiency had been made possible by the new
capital asset pricing model
of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965).
For semi-strong efficiency, this allowed researchers to disaggregate
individual security's returns into a component due to broad market moves
and a "residual" component specific to each security. Semi-strong
efficiency was tested by assessing the behavior of those residuals
leading up to and following announcements. Fama, Fisher, Jensen and Roll
(1969) performed such a study around
announced stock splits. Ball and Brown (1968) did so
with quarterly earnings announcements. Scholes (1969) considered new
stock issuances as well as large underwritten sales of existing common
stock. All these studies gave strong support for semi-strong market
efficiency.
Fama acknowledged that strong market efficiency could
not be a realistic model for the markets, since certain non-public
information clearly presented a profit opportunity for those who
possessed it. Market makers on the New York Stock Exchange made
consistent profits trading stocks due to the privileged information
their positions afforded them. Corporate managers could also profit from
trading based on inside information their positions made available to
them (although the practice was and still is illegal in the United
States). For Fama, the question was not whether the markets were
strongly efficient. It was: how strongly efficient are they?
[4]
Since we already have enough evidence to determine that
the model is not strictly valid, we can now turn to other interesting
questions. Specifically, how far down through the investment community
do deviations from the model permeate? Does it pay for the average
investor (or the average economist) to expend resources searching out
little known information? Are such activities even generally profitable
for various groups of market "professionals"? More generally, who are
the people in the investment community that have access to "special
information"?
Recent work had focused on the performance of mutual
fund managers. If they were able to consistently outperform the markets,
this would suggest they possessed useful insights or information. CAPM provided a framework for considering
their performance on a risk-adjusted basis. This was important because
managers could boost their absolute returns by merely increasing the
systematic risk (beta) of their portfolio—which had nothing to do with
their ability to time the market or pick stocks. Various
metrics for a
manager's risk-adjusted performance were proposed, including
Treynor's
ratio (1965),
Sharpe's ratio (1966) and Jensen's alpha (1968).
Fama cited all three papers, but he focused on Jensen's study, which
looked at 115 mutual funds, primarily over the period 1955-1964. He
found that, on average, investors who put their money in mutual funds
over those ten years would have ended up with a portfolio worth 15% less
than if they had passively invested in the broad market. The
underperformance could be attributed to expenses associated with the
mutual funds. Not counting the effects of loads, fees or
transaction costs, the mutual funds'
performance approximately matched the overall market. The number of
funds that performed well was less than would be expected if funds'
performance was purely a matter of luck. Also, Jensen found that strong
performance tended to not persist. A fund that outperformed in one
subperiod was no more likely to outperform in the subsequent subperiod
than was any other fund. In summary, the evidence suggested that mutual
funds were not adding value before fees and other expenses, and they
were squandering considerable value after fees and other expenses.
Jensen's study and others like it were a devastating
blow to the mutual fund industry. Within a few years, passively managed
index mutual funds were being offered to investors. These generally had
no loads, low fees and, because they bought and held the stocks
comprising specific equity indexes, minimal transaction costs. Index
funds have routinely outperformed actively managed mutual funds ever
since.
Fama's efficient market hypothesis has been an extremely
influential theory. Investors are well advised to accept it
unequivocally because violations that are significant enough to afford
trading opportunities are 1) rare, 2) likely illegal, and 3) if not
illegal, unlikely to be advertised to the retail or institutional
investing public. One of the oldest questions to plague Wall Street
brokers is: if their investment ideas (technical analysis, stock tips,
buy-write programs, etc.) are so good, why do brokers give them away
rather than exploit them themselves?
But violations of strong or semi-strong efficiency have
been documented. There is even a literature on market anomalies,
documenting violations of weak efficiency, although these generally are
too minor to afford profit opportunities after transaction costs.
Jones and Litzenberger (1970)
published one of the first significant violations of semi-strong
efficiency. Suspecting that the markets respond slowly to unexpectedly
good earnings announcements, they constructed portfolios of stocks that
had recently announced such earnings and found that the portfolios
outperformed the overall market in subsequent months. The phenomenon was
observable in every one of ten overlapping periods they considered
between 1964 and 1967, and it was significant enough to earn excess
returns after transaction costs.
Financial institutions have also identified a few
violations of semi-strong efficiency over the years. Not surprisingly,
they didn't give these gems away to clients. The firms kept quiet and
reaped massive profits for themselves. One such opportunity was pairs
trading, which Morgan Stanley exploited in the 1980s. Another was
fixed income arbitrage, which
Salomon Brothers had a team of professionals exploit a decade later.
Such violations don't last, since traders soon exploit the opportunities
out of existence. Don't try pairs trading. the technique is so widely
known today that there are books on the subject. I doubt anyone has made
a dime from it in the last ten years. As for fixed income arbitrage, the
Salomon team set up their own hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM),
but by then, other hedge funds and brokers were in on the act. Profits
were tight and LTCM dabbled in other, unproven speculative trading
strategies. These eventually blew up, and the fund's
leverage caused it to fail.
Today's boom in hedge funds
in not a violation of the efficient market hypothesis. There is
not a scrap of evidence that hedge funds consistently outperform the
market. There is, however, a tremendous amount of hype about flawed
industry studies that claim they have. These studies are based on
incomplete performance data compiled in ways that is known to introduce
significant biases. If anything, the efficient market hypothesis has
demonstrated how rare it is to outperform the markets, which suggested
there is something peculiar about the thousands of hedge funds being
started up each year—each year taking the place of other thousands of
hedge funds that are quietly shut down without any public explanation.
Brokers and hedge fund managers are getting rich off the hedge fund
boom, but investors are not.
The efficient market hypothesis has never been much of a
match for the marketing machine of Wall Street. Still, it has had more influence than most academic theories. Today, trillions of dollars
are invested in index funds. The efficient market hypothesis is also
kept before the public with Burton Malkiel's popular book A Random Walk Down Wall Street .
The engrossing book targets individual investors, but its insightful
discussions of the random walk hypothesis, efficient market hypothesis
and portfolio theory have educated entry-level professionals since the
book was first released in 1973. Any professional involved in trading or
investing who has not read it should consider himself culturally illiterate.
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Ball,
Ray and Phillip Brown (1968). An empirical evaluation of
accounting income numbers, Journal of Accounting Research,
6 (2), 159-178.
Cowles,
Alfred 3rd (1933). Can stock market forecasters forecast?
Econometrica, 1 (3), 309-324.
Fama,
Eugene F. (1965a). The behavior of stock market prices,
Journal of Business, 38 (1), 34-105.
Fama,
Eugene F. (1965b). Random walks in stock prices, Financial
Analysts Journal, 21 (5), 55-59.
Fama,
Eugene F. (1970). Efficient capital markets: A review of theory
and empirical work, Journal of Finance, 25 (2), 383-417.
Fama,
Eugene F., Lawrence Fisher, Michael Jensen and Richard Roll
(1969). The adjustment of stock prices to new information,
International Economic Review, 10 (1), 1-21.
Friend,
Irwin, F. E. Brown, Edward S. Herman, and Douglas Vickers
(1962). A Study of Mutual Funds: Investment Policy and
Investment Company Performance, Report to the Committee on
Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House Report no. 2274, 87th
Congress, Second Session.
Horowitz,
Ira (1963). The varying (?) quality of investment trust
management, Journal of the American Statistical Association,
58 (304), 1011-1032.
Jensen,
Michael (1968). The performance of mutual funds in the period
1945-1964, Journal of Finance, 23 (2), 389-416
Jones,
Charles P. and Robert H. Litzenberger (1970). Quarterly earnings
reports and intermediate stock price trends, Journal of
Finance, 25 (1), 143-148.
Lintner, John
(1965). The valuation of risk assets and the selection of risky
investments in stock portfolios and capital budgets, Review of
Economics and Statistics, 47: 13-37.
Malkiel,
Burton (1973). A Random Walk Down Wall Street , New York:
Norton.
Scholes,
Myron (1969). A test of the competitive hypothesis: The market
for new issues and secondary offerings, doctoral thesis,
University of Chicago.
Sharpe, William F. (1964). Capital
asset prices: A theory of market equilibrium under conditions of
risk, Journal of Finance, 19 (3), 425-442.
Sharpe,
William F. (1966). Mutual fund performance, Journal of
Business, 39 (1) Part 2, Supplement, 119-138.
Treynor,
Jack (1965). How to rate management of investment funds,
Harvard Business Review, 43 (1), 63-75.
Waud,
Roger N. (1970). Public interpretation of discount rate changes:
Evidence on the announcement effect. Econometrica, 38
(2), 231-250 |
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