Fall 2004 Finance 4366 Weblog

Daily Times Series of Closing Prices for the PRESIDENT.GWBUSH2004 and PRESIDENT.KERRY2004 Futures Contracts

Today, the Tradesports website made high, low, and closing daily price data available for the PRESIDENT.GWBUSH2004 and PRESIDENT.KERRY2004 futures contracts.  Below, I provide the graph of daily closing prices for the period August 11, 2004 (which is the first day that the Kerry contract started trading) through October 20, 2004.

Updating of class website

I have updated the class website; note that problem set #4 is now due on Tuesday, October 26, and I plan to cover the rest of Chapter 8 on Thursday, October 21.  The reading for Tuesday, October 26 will be Chapter 9 of the textbook, and I plan to post my Chapter 9 lecture notes on the class website by sometime next Monday, October 25.

lecture notes and problem set assignment

During today's class, we will be covering chapter 8: Properties of Stock Options.  Furthermore, problem set #4 is due on Thursday, October 21, and it consists of questions 8.21-8.24 on page 183 of the textbook.

Who's Behind the Bush-Futures Attacks

Spencer Elliott brought an interesting article to my attention today about "attacks" on the Tradesports futures market over the past months, and speculation about who's doing it.  The article is entitled "Who's Behind the Bush-Futures Attacks?  Although you should not take this as "investment" advice, I do think that the author's idea of entering orders to purchase Bush futures contracts at absurdly low prices (near $0) does make some sense!

Important WSJ article about and video interviews with some of the leading academic thinkers in finance

I highly recommend a page 1 article from today's Wall Street Journal entitled "As Two Economists Debate Markets, the Tide Shifts".  This article provides a very clear explanation of the intellectual history of finance during the past forty years, and how academic scholarship has evolved to embrace a hybrid of the efficient market theory and behavioral finance theory.

I also highly recommend two video interviews featuring Eugene Fama (who is Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago and the founder of the efficient market hypothesis) and Ken French (who is Heidt Professor of Finance, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College and a frequent research collaborator with Fama).  In my opinion, it is not a question of if, but rather a question of when Fama will be awared the Nobel Prize in Economics.