Two Essays on Sell Side Equity Analysts

This dissertation examines the role of sell side equity analysts in the capital market. The first chapter examines whether sell side analysts, who as an important information intermediary, process information that has been shown to predict future stock returns by academic studies. Our sample includes seven firm level characteristics (e.g., anomalies) that have robust return predictability. We test whether analysts’ consensus recommendation and expected returns are consistent with the trading strategies these anomaly variables prescribe. We do not find evidence that sell side analysts are persistently incorporating such information in the correct way. Instead, analysts from certain brokerage firms persistently issue target prices in the opposite direction as what anomaly variables suggests. Our findings suggest that analysts are likely subject to biased expectations and could improve their research quality by incorporating anomaly characteristics. The second chapter investigates whether institutional investors value sell side analysts\u27 qualities differently. We fill the gap in the literature with a novel hand collected dataset, which shows the best sell side analysts voted by hedge funds and institutional investors, respectively. Examining the research output of investors’ revealed preferences allows us to detect the qualities valued by these investors. We find that hedge funds preferred analysts update research more frequently and issue less optimistic stock recommendations. The recommendations revised by these analysts also receive stronger market response in the subsequent six months than those made by other “All-Star” sell side analysts. These findings suggest that there are cross sectional differences among sell side analysts that are associated with clients’ needs

MicroRNAome of Porcine Pre- and Postnatal Development

The domestic pig is of enormous agricultural significance and valuable models for many human diseases. Information concerning the pig microRNAome (miRNAome) has been long overdue and elucidation of this information will permit an atlas of microRNA (miRNA) regulation functions and networks to be constructed. Here we performed a comprehensive search for porcine miRNAs on ten small RNA sequencing libraries prepared from a mixture of tissues obtained during the entire pig lifetime, from the fetal period through adulthood. The sequencing results were analyzed using mammalian miRNAs, the precursor hairpins (pre-miRNAs) and the first release of the high-coverage porcine genome assembly (Sscrofa9, April 2009) and the available expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences. Our results extend the repertoire of pig miRNAome to 867 pre-miRNAs (623 with genomic coordinates) encoding for 1,004 miRNAs, of which 777 are unique. We preformed real-time quantitative PCR (q-PCR) experiments for selected 30 miRNAs in 47 tissue-specific samples and found agreement between the sequencing and q-PCR data. This broad survey provides detailed information about multiple variants of mature sequences, precursors, chromosomal organization, development-specific expression, and conservation patterns. Our data mining produced a broad view of the pig miRNAome, consisting of miRNAs and isomiRs and a wealth of information of pig miRNA characteristics. These results are prelude to the advancement in pig biology as well the use of pigs as model organism for human biological and biomedical studies

tardemah I

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

verfaultes Kreis(-)chen

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

Toccata

This music score was submitted for the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library

Omics-Scale Bioinformatics Technology and Methods: from Data to Information

Omics-scale bioinformatics is an emerging discipline of science that plays an essential role in analyzing and interpreting large scale biological data. In this thesis, I developed three different omics-scale bioinformatics methods to facilitate the studies of human miRNAs, synthetic DNA oligo library and histone post-translational modifications (PTMs), respectively. MiRNAs, which are involved in various biological processes by regulating multiple genes, have been an area of research drawing intensive interest in the recent two decades. There exists an enormous amount of miRNA related information, and how to effectively mine the valuable information embedded in the large volume of literature has become an urgent problem. Because each of the existing online databases includes only partial information about human miRNAs, I created a comprehensive web-based resource ‘miRFocus’ for conveniently retrieving extensive and comprehensive human miRNA information and conducting pathway and Gene Ontology (GO) term enrichment analysis. Current next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies mainly focus on genome or transcriptome sequencing analysis and none of the existing NGS methods is suitable for high resolution nucleobase-specific analysis of libraries of synthetic oligonucleotides, which are used as materials for engineering long DNA fragments in synthetic biology applications. To meet such requirements, I developed an algorithm and software tool for analyzing synthetic oligo libraries. This approach is composed of two-step quality control and Bowtie2-based sequence alignments. It is proved that such a method successfully assessed the efficiency of etMICC-based error-removal method on synthetic oligos of different lengths and identified that etMICC columns has higher binding affinity with gap error structure than substitution error structure. Epiproteomics examines diverse PTMs, such as histone methylation. However, traditional methods of studying histone PTMs are expensive in cost, labor and time. I developed a histone peptide array (hPepArray) for analyzing activities of cellular histone methyltransferases (HMTs). Lysine-containing peptides of hPepArray are directly generated from 10 histone proteins. In the hPepArray, two known methylation sites H3K122 and H4K59 are verified and one possible methylation site H2A-K74 is identified. The experimental results demonstrate that hPepArray and the method of analysis offer a high-throughput epiproteomic tool to assay activities of HMTs in nuclear lysates.Biology and Biochemistry, Department o

Time(e)scap(ad)es

Time(e)scap(ad)es (2016) for marimba solo and chamber ensemble is a work that explores the interweaving of musical textures as determined by predetermined musical time. This is achieved with rhythmic patterns, as well as metric/hypermetric patterns. The traditional sense of orchestration, of material development, and of form, is challenged amicably by this focused perspective. The inclusive pun expresses the feeling of time as fleeting moments, as (in)measurable spaces, and the experience of it as the adventurous play that is abound in this work