The Small World of Investing: Board Connections and Mutual Fund Returns

This paper uses social networks to identify information transfer in security markets. We focus on connections between mutual fund managers and corporate board members via shared education networks. We find that portfolio managers place larger bets on firms they are connected to through their network, and perform significantly better on these holdings relative to their non-connected holdings. A replicating portfolio of connected stocks outperforms a replicating portfolio of non-connected stocks by up to 8.4% per year. Returns are concentrated around corporate news announcements, consistent with mutual fund managers gaining an informational advantage through the education networks. Our results suggest that social networks may be an important mechanism for information flow into asset prices.

Cascade-based attacks on complex networks

We live in a modern world supported by large, complex networks. Examples range from financial markets to communication and transportation systems. In many realistic situations the flow of physical quantities in the network, as characterized by the loads on nodes, is important. We show that for such networks where loads can redistribute among the nodes, intentional attacks can lead to a cascade of overload failures, which can in turn cause the entire or a substantial part of the network to collapse. This is relevant for real-world networks that possess a highly heterogeneous distribution of loads, such as the Internet and power grids. We demonstrate that the heterogeneity of these networks makes them particularly vulnerable to attacks in that a large-scale cascade may be triggered by disabling a single key node. This brings obvious concerns on the security of such systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Revte

Forecasting stock price movements using neural networks

Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-101).The prediction of security prices has shown to be one of the most important but most difficult tasks in financial operations. Linear approaches failed to model the non-linear behaviour of markets and non-linear approaches turned out to posses too many constraints. Neural networks seem to be a suitable method to overcome these problems since they provide algorithms which process large sets of data from a non-linear context and yield thorough results. The first problem addressed by this research paper is the applicability of neural networks with respect to markets as a tool for pattern recognition. It will be shown that markets posses the necessary requirements for the use of neural networks, i.e. markets show patterns which are exploitable

The UK's global gas challenge

A UKERC Research Report exploring the UK's global gas challenge. This report takes an interdisciplinary perspective, which marries energy security insights from politics and international relations, with detailed empirical understanding from energy studies and perspectives from economic geography that emphasise the spatial distribution of actors, networks and resource flows that comprise the global gas industry. Natural gas production in the UK peaked in 2000, and in 2004 it became a net importer. A decade later and the UK now imports about half of the natural gas that it consumes. The central thesis of the project on which this report is based is that as the UK’s gas import dependence has grown, it has effectively been ‘globalising’ its gas security; consequently UK consumers are increasingly exposed to events in global gas markets. - See more at: http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/publications/the-uk-s-global-gas-challenge.html#sthash.wEP831Zn.dpu

No. 09: The State of Household Food Security in Nanjing, China

This report on the state of food security in Nanjing, China, is based on a 2015 city-wide survey conducted by Nanjing University and the Hungry Cities Partnership. The research found that most of the city’s residents are food secure, with access to desirable foods and high dietary diversity throughout the year. Nanjing has a high level of economic development, low unemployment, and spatially dense food supply networks. However, a high average level of food security obscures the finding that about one household in five is food insecure according to the Household Food Insecurity Access Prevalence indicator. Female-centred households, households that have no formal wage worker, and households with only one member tend to be the most food insecure. The proximity of wet markets and supermarkets to food retail and food procurement by households across Nanjing emerges clearly in this survey, and the relationship between wet markets and supermarkets appears to be more complementary than competitive. The survey found that three in four respondents feel exposed to threats of unsafe food from the production and processing stages of food supply chains, especially from the overuse of agrochemicals in the agriculture and livestock industry. There is a widespread perception that the ineffective enforcement of regulations by local governments is the major cause of food safety problems

Exploring Possibilities to Enhance Food Sovereignty within the Cowpea Production-Consumption Network in Northern Ghana

Over the last years an important focus in the combat of hunger and malnutrition,particularly in Africa has been food security. This article explores possibilities for enhancing food sovereignty, as an alternative concept to food security and an alternative strategy for reversing hunger and malnutrition trends in developing countries. A combination of literature review, participatory appraisal and conventional survey methodologies are used to investigate the relevance of local cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) network regarding its importance vis-à-vis other crops, varietal choice, and consumption patterns in Northern Ghana from food sovereignty perspective. Findings reveal how people in poverty-stricken and hunger- hot- spot communities strive to conserve their biodiversity and production-consumption networks for posterity. Local cowpea varietal preferences are investigated for participatory breeding considerations to improve on seed access for sustainable production. Promotion of origin-based foods in the current fast growing globalised markets is recommended as a possibility to enhance food sovereignty for sustainable development in Afric

Multilateral Transparency for Security Markets Through DLT

For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies in the U.S. National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive— together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system— have pushed Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to convert fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency. Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: (1) multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and (2) highspeed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, thus preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership and transfer to those issuers and thus, restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer. A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high—with each Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to ten minutes. To remedy this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography. Second, we introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks,” which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. Against the background of existing securities trading and settlement, this Article demonstrates that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration

Markets as networks: the embeddedness of private security in Argentina

A partir de un estudio de la seguridad privada en Argentina, exploramos algunas hipótesis desarrolladas en el ámbito de la sociología económica para el estudio de los mercados: por un lado, que los empresarios utilizan sus contactos y su reputación para crear y mantener una clientela; por otro, que las empresas tratan de ocupar nichos para evitar una lucha abierta y frontal con sus competidores. Siguiendo las ideas desarrolladas por Mark Granovetter, Harrison White y Wayne Baker, el artículo muestra que la conformación de un mercado no es la respuesta a una demanda preexistente, sino el resultado de la iniciativa de los empresarios y de las estrategias de adaptación de las empresas, y que los mercados en general no se organizan como realidades simples y homogéneas, sino como estructuras diferenciadas de roles fundadas en redes limitadas y restrictivas.Based on an inquiry into private security in Argentina, this paper explores some hypotheses developed in the field of economic sociology to study markets: on the one hand, that entrepreneurs use their contacts and reputation to create and maintain a clientele; on the other hand, that companies try to fill niches to avoid an open competition with its contenders. Following the ideas developed by Mark Granovetter and Wayne Baker, the paper shows that the development of a market is not the response to an existing demand, but the result of the initiative of entrepreneurs and the strategies of firms, and that markets generally are not organized as simple and homogeneous realities, but as distinct structures of roles based on limited and restrictive networks.Fil: Lorenc Valcarce, Federico Mario. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin