Active vs. Passive Portfolio Management

In the finance community there is a huge debate about whether or not active portfolio managers can provide better returns than passive managers. While active managers often provide excess returns, the costs of running an active fund offset whatever gains were made in the market. The objective of this report is to figure out whether or not active funds provide larger returns than passive funds on a cost adjusted basis. This report will identify which type of fund is a more cost effective investment, as well as identify different properties of funds and how they operate. The goal of doing this research is to provide information to the average investor, rather than a multi-millionaire, about what kind of fund may be more appropriate for them to invest in. To successfully complete this project I collected quantitative fund data from fidelity, and qualitative information from various finance and business journals. After running a multivariate analysis of variance on my data I found that passive funds in the 1 year period provided significantly greater returns than active funds on a cost adjusted basis. Next, over the 3 year period, there was no significant difference between the returns of active and passive stock funds. However, during the 5 year period return active funds proved to be a more cost effective investment strategy. From my results I have concluded that active portfolio management is not a more cost effective investment tool than passive management

Narrative of the Volunteer Camp at Niagara, June 1871

Editor’s Introduction: The Canadian military as we know it emerged in the critical decades that immediately preceded and followed Confederation in 1867. While a number of accounts are available of militia officers’ experiences in these decades, so far we have missed the important perspective of rank and file. Recently, however, an interesting example of such a perspective has come to light and has been added to the collection of the Canadian War Museum (CWM). This is in the form of a short but insightful narrative, written by a Private Andrew Greenhill of Hamilton, Ontario’s 13th Battalion, Canadian Militia, describing his experiences while serving at the Militia Camp held at Niagara in June 1871

Making Markov chains less lazy

The mixing time of an ergodic, reversible Markov chain can be bounded in terms of the eigenvalues of the chain: specifically, the second-largest eigenvalue and the smallest eigenvalue. It has become standard to focus only on the second-largest eigenvalue, by making the Markov chain "lazy". (A lazy chain does nothing at each step with probability at least 1/2, and has only nonnegative eigenvalues.) An alternative approach to bounding the smallest eigenvalue was given by Diaconis and Stroock and Diaconis and Saloff-Coste. We give examples to show that using this approach it can be quite easy to obtain a bound on the smallest eigenvalue of a combinatorial Markov chain which is several orders of magnitude below the best-known bound on the second-largest eigenvalue.Comment: 8 page

Exploring ‘events’ as an information systems research methodology

This paper builds upon existing research and commentary from a variety of disciplinary sources including Information Systems, Organisational and Management Studies, and the Social Sciences that focus upon the meaning, significance and impact of ‘events’ in both an organisational and a social sense. The aim of this paper is to define how the examination of the event is an appropriate, viable and useful Information Systems methodology. Our argument is that focusing on the ‘event’ enables the researcher to more clearly observe and capture the complexity, multiplicity and mundaneity of everyday lived experience. The use and notion of ‘event’ has the potential to reduce the methodological dilemmas associated with the micromanagement of the research process – an inherent danger of traditional and ‘virtual' ethnographic approaches. Similarly, this paper addresses the over-emphasis upon managerialist, structured and time-fixated praxis that is currently symptomatic of Information Systems research. All of these concerns are pivotal points of critique found within eventoriented literature. An examination of event-related theory within interpretative disciplines directs the focus of this paper towards the more specific realm of the ‘event scene’. The notion of the ‘event scene’ originated in the action based (and anti-academy) imperatives of the Situationists and emerged in an academic sense as critical situational analysis. Event scenes are a focus for contemporary critical theory where they are utilised as a means of representing theoried inquiry in order to loosen the restrictions that historical and temporally bound analysis imposes upon most interpretative approaches. The use of event scenes as the framework for critiquing established conceptual assumptions is exemplified by their use in CTheory. In this journal's version and articulation of the event scene poetry, commentary, multi-vocal narrative and other techniques are legitimated as academic forms. These various forms of multi-dimensional expression are drawn upon to enrich the understandings of the ‘event’, to extricate its meaning and to provide a sense of the moment from which the point of analysis stems. The objective of this paper is to advocate how Information Systems research can (or should) utilize an event scene oriented methodology