...ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to attempt to understand to what degree accounting information can serve as a valid predictor of future financial performance. It is understood and often disputed that predicting financial performance beyond a time horizon of four years, using accounting analysis is not as reliable as initially determined. Based on both academic research studies and reviews alongside nonacademic reviews, it seems plausible to a certain comfortable level that it is possible to incorporate targeted and focused accounting information and ratios in conjunction with additional industry/market based variables within statistical models to be successful in predicting future performance beyond the short run. Financial ratios, together with other analyses, are widely used as critical indicators in evaluating a firm’s performance. One question constantly arises, which financial ratios are informative among the hundred ratios available? Material below will identify and support particular ratios of focus. Research also suggests that in order to accurately forecast future financial performance, accounting information needs to work alongside other variables (i.e. firm size, economic trends, and industry specific ratios). Beyond the microeconomics of the company, analysis should also consider relevant macroeconomics that can have a direct correlation on a firm’s success. Based on all findings included, there has been no distinct criticism of using accounting information...
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...The Impact of Non-audit Services on Capital Markets Seunghan Nam Ph.D. Candidate Stern School of Business New York University New York, NY 10012 snam@stern.nyu.edu Preliminary Draft 7 January 2005 Abstract The framers of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOA) presume that non-audit services lower the quality of financial statements, so they have prohibited auditors from offering most non-audit services. In addition, regulators believe that non-audit services (NAS) may cause the auditor to be perceived as “dependent” in appearance, thus increasing information risk, even if they have no impact on the quality of financial statements. I investigate two hypotheses using pre-SOA data. First, I ask whether the proportion of non-audit services fees to total fees has a positive or negative association with the ability of financial statements to predict a firm’s future cash flows, which can be considered a measure of the quality of the statements. Second, I ask whether the proportion has a negative or positive association with the cost of capital and the bid/ask spread, controlling for the predictive ability. The cost of capital and the bid/ask spread serve as proxies of information risk. Contrary to the proponents of prohibiting NAS, I find that the proportion of non-audit services fees to total fees has a positive association with the predictive ability. If we control for the quality of financial statements, non-audit services still have a negative association...
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...Information and Predicting Financial Performance: Accounting information can be useful in order to help predict future performance in the short and long term. It is important to note however that accounting information including accounting ratios show a company’s performance at a period in time. It is historical data. Trends can be identified by comparing data in sequential periods and future forecasts can be determined using historical data. There is no evidence or proof however, that these patterns will predict the future at a level of complete certainty. In my opinion, it would be hard to argue that decreasing profits over an extended period of time, or deteriorating liquid assets and increasing long term debt will have a negative impact if a trend continues. Eventually a company will have financial difficulties. Another type of predictive model that utilizes accounting information includes regression analysis. Regression analysis is viewed by many to be more useful that financial data or ratios alone. Regression analysis often test whether past stock prices, sales, profit, financial ratios, solvency, and other items are related to other variables including GDP, interest rates, market saturation of the industry, etc. In addition, a degree of confidence can be determined concerning the relationship of the variables in regression analysis Accounting ratios are determined from financial data, which as mentioned is historical. I do not feel that all financial ratios have the same...
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...According to www.PredictiveAnalyticsWorld.com, “Predictive analytics is business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or other organizational element. Assigning these predictive scores is the job of a predictive model, which has been trained over your data, learning from the experience of your organization. It continues to say, “Predictive analytics optimizes marketing campaigns and website behavior to increase customer responses, conversions and clicks, and to decrease churn. Each customer's predictive score informs actions to be taken with that customer.” Predictive analytics are used to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the likelihood of a situation occurring. It is the branch of data mining concerned with the prediction of future probabilities and trends. Predictive analytics are used to automatically analyze large amounts of data with different variables; it includes clustering, decision trees, market basket analysis, regression modeling, etc. There are three main benefits of predictive analytics: minimizing risk, identifying fraud, and pursuing new sources of revenue. Being able to predict the risks involved with loan and credit origination, fraudulent insurance claims, and making predictions with regard to promotional offers and coupons are all examples of these benefits. This type of algorithm allows businesses to test all sorts of situations and scenarios it could take years to test in the real world. Investing...
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...Yale ICF Working Paper No. 02-04 November 21, 2002 PREDICTING THE EQUITY PREMIUM (WITH DIVIDEND RATIOS) Amit Goyal Goizueta Business School at Emory Ivo Welch Yale School of Management NBER This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=158148 Predicting the Equity Premium (With Dividend Ratios)∗ Amit Goyal† Goizueta Business School at Emory and Ivo Welch‡ Yale School of Management and NBER November 21, 2002 Abstract Our paper suggests a simple recursive residuals (out-of-sample) graphical approach to evaluating the predictive power of popular equity premium and stock market time-series forecasting regressions. When applied, we find that dividend-ratios should have been known to have no predictive ability even prior to the 1990s, and that any seeming ability even then was driven by only two years, 1973 and 1974. Our paper also documents changes in the time-series processes of the dividends themselves and shows that an increasing persistence of dividend-price ratio is largely responsible for the inability of dividend ratios to predict equity premia. Cochrane (1997)’s accounting identity—that dividend ratios have to predict long-run dividend growth or stock returns— empirically holds only over horizons longer than 5–10 years. Over shorter horizons, dividend yields primarily forecast themselves. JEL Classification: G12, G14. ∗ Forthcoming: Management Science. The paper and its data...
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...Assignment 1: DDS, BI, Business Analytics, and Predictive Analytics LaShonda Spell Prof. S. Mirajkar CIS 356 Operating a successful business today involves utilizing the correct tools to make the best decisions for that business. The main tools that are used for making critical business decisions are DSS, DDS, BI, Business Analytics and Predictive Analytics systems. The concepts/ systems mentioned assist management in the major decision-making processes by providing crucial operational data in comprehensible formats for monitoring/ reviewing and analyzing. Making the best decisions regarding business operations determine the success or failure of the company and ensures that all business strategies are implemented and effective. In this essay, there is a brief overview of the similarities/ differences, methodologies/ technologies and evaluation of the capabilities of DDS, BI, Business Analytics and Predictive Analytics systems. Similarities and Differences among DDS, BI, Business Analytics, and Predictive Analytics regarding business scope/origins /histories/ methodologies/ technologies DDS (Data Distribution Service) are data communications based on the standards managed by the OMG (Object Management Group). The standards set by the OMG of DDS describe different latency levels of data communications for distributed applications (Twin Oaks Computing, Inc., 2011). DDS standard support data defining applications, dynamic publishing/ subscribing discovery and QoS policy...
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...HAZARD* Karl S. Okamoto ** How do we prevent excessive risk taking in the financial markets? This Essay offers a strategy for regulating financial markets to better prevent the kind of disaster we saw during the Financial Crisis of 2008. By developing a model of risk-manager decisionmaking, this Essay illustrates how even “good people” acting in utterly rational and expected ways brought us into economic turmoil. The assertion of this Essay is that the root cause of the Financial Crisis was systemic moral hazard. Systemic moral hazard poses a unique challenge in crafting a regulatory response. The challenge lies in that the best response to systemic moral hazard is “predictive prevention.” It is inherently difficult to reward individuals for producing predictive prevention. Unsurprisingly, markets fail to produce it at optimal levels and thus cannot prevent systemic moral hazard and the kind of crises that ensue. The difficulty in valuing predictive prevention is seen when we model how risk managers make decisions regarding the prevention of excessive risk. The model reveals how the balance can be tipped in favor of risk taking that leads to systemic failure and broad social harm. The model also reveals how regulation might work to reset the balance to one that is superior for society. We can achieve optimal risktaking decisionmaking in two ways: (1) by requiring all asset managers in the market to put their own money at risk in their trading decisions; and (2) by requiring...
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...Data Mining Professor Clifton Howell CIS500-Information Systems Decision Making March 7, 2014 Benefits of data mining to the businesses One of the benefits to data mining is the ability to utilize information that you have stored to predict the possibilities of consumer’s actions and needs to make better business decisions. We implement a business intelligence that will produce a predictive score for those consumers to determine these possibilities. Predictive analytics is the business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or other organizational element. Assigning these predictive scores is the job of a predictive model which has, in turn, been trained over your data, learning from the experience of your organization. (Impact, 2014) The usefulness of predictive scoring is obvious. However, with no predictive model and no means to score your consumer, the possibility of gaining a competitive edge and revenue is also predictable. To discover consumer buying patterns from a transaction database, mining association rules are used to make better business decisions. However because users may only be interested in certain information from this database and do not want to invest a lot of time in searching for what they need, association discovery will assist in limiting the data to which only the end user needs. Association discovery will utilize algorithms to lessen the quantity of groupings of item sets or sequences in each customer...
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...Literature Review 7 Framework 9 Data Analysis 14 Qualitative Analysis 14 Qualitative Analysis 16 Research Methodology 17 Conclusion 20 Bibliography 21 APPENDIX – I APPENDIX – II APPENDIX – III APPENDIX – IV APPENDIX - V Introduction Predictive analytics has its origin from a famous saying: Past performance is the basic indicator of future results. It looks at historical cases and builds models which can then be applied to benefit present scenarios or predict future scenarios. Predictive Analytics is the best way for a business to predict customer responses in the future. It provides solutions for businesses facing main problems like ‘What segment of potential consumers will respond best to our message’ and ‘how can I stop my customers from leaving, and why am I losing them?’(Curtis, 2010). Predictive analytics is not just for providing a solution for a business problem but involves techniques mainly to improve the focus of company towards customers and customers towards company. The magnificence of predictive analytics is that a business characteristically perceives a win-win situation. In other words, a business not only benefits from higher returns but also gets to save on cost (Colin, 2009). Predictive analytics is becoming a competitive necessity and an important aspect of many types of business, particularly in this type of economy where an organization is trying to increase its efficiency and at the same time maintain and grow the business. The choice...
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...The use of Financial Ratios for Research: Problems Associated with and Recommendations for Using Large Databases Introduction The use of financial ratio analysis for understanding and predicting the performance of privately owned business firms is gaining in importance in published research. Perhaps the major problem faced by researchers is the difficulty of obtaining an adequate sample of representative financial statements with many studies using 50 or fewer firms for analysis. However, when larger databases are used, it is important to know that they have problems as well and that adjustments to these samples must be made to permit the use of multivariate analysis techniques. Understanding how to properly use large databases for ratio analysis will become of importance now that the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (KCEL) has developed a financial statement database of more than 400,000 privately owned firms with a significant number of these including a base year and three operating years of financial statements. This database is currently available to a team of scholars working closely with the KCEL on selected internal studies. It is expected that this database will become generally available to researchers and this source of financial statement information is likely to become the standard for financial performance research in the future. For the first time, scholars will have a large commonly available database of privately owned firm financial...
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...Emerging Market Mutual Fund Performance and the State of the Economy∗ Ayelen Banegas November 2010 Abstract Following the financial liberalization of many Asian, European, and Latin American countries emerging markets have become a central player in the global economy. As a result the universe of equity funds investing in these developing economies has been in continuous expansion. In this paper we propose a set of asset class specific predictive variables for emerging markets and exploit them in order to identify those funds that outperform the market in different phases of the economic cycle. We employ a comprehensive survivorship-bias free universe of global and regional emerging market funds and use a Bayesian framework that incorporates predictability in manager skills (stock selection and benchmark timing skills), fund risk loadings and benchmark returns by exploiting ex-ante business cycle related state variables. Our results provide empirical evidence of return predictability and the economic value of active management in emerging markets. ∗ I would like to thank Allan Timmermann for his guidance and support. I am also grateful to James Hamilton, Bruce N. Lehmann, Ross Valkanov and Debbie Watkins for their helpful comments. I also benefited from discussions with Ben Gillen. Finally, I want to thank Russ Wermers for providing me with the mutual fund dataset. 1 1 Introduction During the last decades the mutual fund industry has been continuously...
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...discovery of recurring patterns in financial market time series for the purpose of predicting and profiting from trends and trend reversals the prices of freely traded assets such as stocks, market indexes, exchange traded funds (ETF), commodities, currencies and financial futures and options . Objective TA is restricted to patterns that can be represented numerically and trading systems that produce clear cut buy and sell signals that can be evaluated on historical data. Thus objective TA is concerned with the development of trading systems. Other forms of technical analysis rely upon the visual inspection and subjective interpretation of graphs to detect patterns and predict trends. Objective TA employs indicators, which are new time series derived by applying one or more mathematical transformations to raw market data such as price, volume, open-interest and other data series produced by trading activity. For example, technical analysts apply moving averages to identify price trends. Data mining (DM) is also concerned with patterns and prediction and thus the natural fit between DM and objective TA. Data miners use specialized algorithms to analyze large data multivariate data bases containing thousands or even million of cases with the intent of discovering unobvious patterns that can be used to predict various kinds of outcomes. The end product of a DM effort is a predictive model based the discovered patterns. Ultimately the model is used to make predictions on future...
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...their portfolios By JOHN FERRY AND MIKE FOSTER Updated April 12, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET The recent financial crisis has all but torn up the investment rule book—received wisdoms have been found wanting if not plain wrong. Investors are being forced to decide whether the theoretical foundations upon which their portfolios are constructed need to be repaired or abandoned. Some are questioning the wisdom of investing in public markets at all. ENLARGE ROBERT NEUBECKER Many professional investors have traditionally used a technique known as modern portfolio theory to help decide which assets they should put money in. This approach examines the past returns and volatility of various asset classes and also looks at their correlation—how they perform in relation to each other. From these numbers wealth managers calculate the optimum percentage of a portfolio that should be invested in each asset class to achieve an expected rate of return for a given level of risk. It is a relatively neat construct. But it has its problems. One is that past figures for risk, return and correlation are not always a good guide to the future. In fact, they may be downright misleading. "These aren't natural sciences we're dealing with," says Kevin Gardiner, head of investment strategy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Barclays Wealth in London. "It's very difficult to establish underlying models and correlations. And even if you can establish those, it's extremely difficult to treat them with...
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...[pic]Porter's Four Corners Model Porter’s four corners model is a predictive tool designed by Michael Porter that helps in determining a competitor’s course of action. Unlike other predictive models which predominantly rely on a firm’s current strategy and capabilities to determine future strategy, Porter’s model additionally calls for an understanding of what motivates the competitor. This added dimension of understanding a competitor's internal culture, value system, mindset and assumptions help in determining a much more accurate and realistic reading of a competitor’s possible reactions in a given situation. The Four Corners Motivation – drivers This helps in determining competitor's action by understanding their goals (both strategic and tactical) and their current position vis-à-vis their goals. A wide gap between the two could mean the competitor is highly likely to react to any external threat that comes in its way, whereas a narrower gap is likely to produce a defensive strategy. Question to be answered here is: What is it that drives the competitor? These drivers can be at various levels and dimensions and can provide insights into future goals. Motivation – Management Assumptions The perceptions and assumptions the competitor has about itself and its industry would shape strategy. This corner includes determining the competitor's perception of its strengths and weaknesses, organization culture and their beliefs about competitor's goals. If the competitor thinks...
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...5 Insights for executives Predictive analytics The C-suite’s shortcut to the business of tomorrow Of special interest to Chief executive officer Chief financial officer Chief marketing or sales officer Chief information officer In the era of big data, companies across a range of industries are recognizing the need for better intelligence and insight about their business. They want to work out how to make the best decisions, drawing on the right information, at the right time. • Finding and accelerating growth opportunities — drawing on internal and external data to help model and predict business outcomes, identify the most profitable opportunities and differentiate the business from its rivals. One organization that has been pioneering in its use of predictive analytics has been the United States Postal Service. Using an analytical approach, it predicted which workers’ compensation claims and payments were unwarranted — and saved some US$9.5 million during 2012 alone. This is not an isolated example: many leading organizations have started to regard their information as a corporate asset. • Improving business performance — enabling agile planning, more accurate forecasting, better budgeting and trusted decision-making support. Business benefit can be gained by creating systems that can convert information into actionable insights, all within the context of key business priorities. Some of these include: 2 | 5 Insights for executives ...
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