A Portfolio Approach to Venture Capital Financing

This paper studies the contracting choices between an entrepreneur and venture capital investors in a portfolio context. We rely on the mean-variance framework and derive the optimal choices for an entrepreneur with and without the presence of different kinds of venture capitalists. In particular, we show that the entrepreneur always has the incentive to share the risk and benefits of the venture whenever possible. On the basis of their objectives and characteristics, we distinguish the situations of the corporate, independent, and bank-sponsored venture capital funds. Our framework enables us to derive the optimal contract design for the entrepreneur, featuring the choice of investor, the entrepreneur’s investment in the venture, and her dilution in the project’s equity as a function of her bargaining power. This result allows us to characterize the choice of the investor depending on her cost of equity and debt capital. In addition to project size and risk, entrepreneur’s risk aversion turns out to be a critical determinant of VC investor choice –a finding which is strongly supported by a panel analysis of VC fund flows for 5 European countries over the 2002-2009 period.Venture capital, Portfolio choice, Entrepreneur, Risk aversion

Currency Total Return Swaps: Valuation and Risk Factor Analysis

Currency total return swaps (CTRS) are hybrid derivatives instruments that allow to simultaneously hedge against credit and currency risks. We develop a structural credit risk model to evaluate CTRS premia. Empirical test on a sample of 23,005 price observations from 59 underlying issuers yields an average percentage error of around 10%. This indicates that, beyond interest rate risk, firm-specific factors are major drivers of the variations in the valuation of these instruments. Regression analysis of residuals shows that exchange rate determinants account for up to 40% of model pricing errors – indicating that a currency risk premium affects the CTRS price significantly but only marginally, which confirms the prevalence of credit risk in the pricing of CTRS.Credit derivative, credit risk, currency risk

A Structural Balance Sheet Model of Sovereign Credit Risk

This article studies sovereign credit spreads using a contingent claims model and a balance sheet representation of the sovereign economy. Analytical formulae for domestic and external debt values as well as for the financial guarantee are derived in a framework where recovery rate is endogenously determined as the solution of a strategic bargaining game. The approach allows to relate sovereign credit spreads to observable macroeconomic factors, and in particular accounts for contagion effects through the corporate and banking sectors. Pricing performance as well as predictions about credit spread determinants are successfully tested on the Brazilian economy.Sovereign credit spread, Balance sheet, Recovery rate, Contingent claims analysis, Contagion effects

Portfolio choice and investor preferences: A semi-parametric approach based on risk horizon

The paper proposes an innovative framework for characterizing investors' behavior in portfolio selection. The approach is based on the realistic perspective of unknown investors' utility and incomplete information on returns distribution. Using a four-moment generalization of the Chebyshev inequality, an intuitive risk measure, risk horizon, is introduced with reference to the speed of convergence of a portfolio's mean return to its expectation. Empirical implementation provides evidence on the consistency of the approach with standard portfolio criteria such as, among others, the Sharpe ratio, a shortfall probability decay-rate optimization and a general class of flexible three-parameter utility functions

Accommodating profile dynamism in MiFID II

The requirements of the MiFID I and II Directives regarding suitability of investor's advice seem a burden to many banks. Such a point of view induces them, in turn, to consider investor profiling with great reluctance, and restrict their view on the administrative side only. In this paper, we claim that a genuine client-centric advisory process could turn the personal information gathering and analysis stage into a real asset for a loyal and mutually profitable relationship. The recognition of the different facets of investor profiles - objectives and constraints, horizon, but most notably the distinct dimensions of risk aversion and loss aversion - enables the financial advisor to get a much more refined, objective and convincing financial picture of the client. This, in turn, opens up the way to a greater alignment of the portfolio on the profile. We show, with the example of traditional portfolio allocations based on a static asset allocation process, that the full complexity of the investor's requirement is not met by only accounting for risk aversion in the profiling process. Worse still, the new MiFID II requirement of a dynamic monitoring of the portfolio-profile relation over time can totally become out of control. We also demonstrate that with proper tools, the advisor and portfolio manager can indeed combine a compliance to the letter and spirit of the regulatory process, with the fulfillment of the investor's objective and the generation of "happy moments" in the customer relationship. To achieve this virtuous cycle, financial institutions have to understand that the traditional approaches inherited from the 20th century have to evolve, just like medicine cannot afford to diagnoses diseases on the basis of remedies that used to be state-of-the-art decades ago

Development path and capital structure of belgian biotechnology firms

This study investigates the relationship between the evolution of real options values and associated financing policies for Belgian companies in the sector of bio-industries. Each firm's situation regarding the relevant types of real options is stylistically represented through a scenario tree. The consumption of a time-to-build or a growth option is respectively considered as a success or a failure in company development. Empirically, several variables enable us to locate each company along the tree at any time. The study of transitions leads us to discover that failures tend to trigger higher leverage, unlike in the trade-off theory. Yet, the increases in debt maturity, in lease and in convertible financing confirm our predictions. Overall, we emphasize evidence of undercapitalization and of proper, yet insufficient, use of hybrid financing by biotech companies.

New Insight on the Performance of Equity Long/short Investment Styles

peer reviewedLong-short equity strategies have recently generated exceptional performance raising a set of concerns about the strategies’ propensity to deliver alpha or beta. This paper revisits the performance of equity long-short hedge funds across investments styles. We first categorize individual hedge funds with regard to their size and/or value factor investing along the generalization of Sharpe (1992) style analysis. Style weights on size and value factors are used to split the equity long-short universe in 5x5 hedge fund style portfolios. To analyze the performance of each style, we consider two sets of innovative factors. First, we apply sequential Fama-French model of Lambert, Fays and Hübner (2015). Besides, to captures downside and extreme risk embedded in hedge fund strategies we augment the model with the co-skewness and co-kurtosis factors developed by Lambert and Hübner (2013). Under this framework, we perform cross-sectional performance analyses of individual hedge funds as well as time-series analysis on the hedge fund style broad category. Our contributions are threefold; first, our alternative framework significantly improves the explanatory power of the multi-factor model in the context of long-short equity funds, second, considering higher-moment factors aim to capture part of the abnormal return of the downside and extreme risk exposures taken by a fund manager, and finally, long-short equity hedge funds are, to some extent, less exposed to small capitalisation stocks than expected and instead rather prefer higher momentum levels in their strategies.Hedge funds special editio

Currency Total Return Swaps: Valuation and Risk Factor Analysis

Currency total return swaps (CTRS) are hybrid derivatives instruments that allow to simultaneously hedge against credit and currency risks. We develop a structural credit risk model to evaluate CTRS premia. Empirical test on a sample of 23,005 price observations from 59 underlying issuers yields an average percentage error of around 10%. This indicates that, beyond interest rate risk, firm-specific factors are major drivers of the variations in the valuation of these instruments. Regression analysis of residuals shows that exchange rate determinants account for up to 40% of model pricing errors – indicating that a currency risk premium affects the CTRS price significantly but only marginally, which confirms the prevalence of credit risk in the pricing of CTRS

Hedge Fund Performance and Persistence in Bull and Bear Markets

Hedge Fund Performance and Persistence in Bull and Bear Markets DANIEL P.J. CAPOCCI University of Liege - Economics, Business Administration and Social Sciences A. CORHAY University of Liege - Department of Financial Management; University of Maastricht (formerly University of Limburg) - Department of Finance GEORGES HUBNER University of Liege - Economics, Business Administration and Social Sciences ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Abstract: This paper tests the performance of 2894 hedge funds in a time period that encompasses unambiguously bullish and bearish trends whose pivot is commonly set at March 2000. Our database proves to be fairly trustable with respect to the most important biases in hedge funds studies, despite the high attrition rate of funds observed in the down market. We apply an original ten-factor composite performance model that achieves very high significance levels. The analysis of performance indicates that most hedge funds significantly out-performed the market during the whole test period, mostly thanks to the bullish sub-period. In contrast, no significant under-performance of individual hedge funds strategies is observed when markets headed south. The analysis of persistence yields very similar results, with most of the predictability being found among middle performers during the bullish period. However, the Market Neutral strategy represents a remarkable exception, as abnormal performance is sustained throughout and significant persistence can be found between the 20% and 69% best performers in this category, probably thanks to an extreme adaptability and a very active investment behavior.Hedge fund, hedge funds, carhart, capocci, hubner, performance, persistence, decile analysis

A Portfolio Approach to Venture Capital Financing

This paper studies the contracting choices between an entrepreneur and venture capital investors in a portfolio context. We rely on the mean-variance framework and derive the optimal choices for an entrepreneur with and without the presence of different kinds of venture capitalists. In particular, we show that the entrepreneur always has the incentive to share the risk and benefits of the venture whenever possible. On the basis of their objectives and characteristics, we distinguish the situations of the corporate, independent, and bank-sponsored venture capital funds. Our framework enables us to derive the optimal contract design for the entrepreneur, featuring the choice of investor, the entrepreneur’s investment in the venture, and her dilution in the project’s equity as a function of her bargaining power. This result allows us to characterize the choice of the investor depending on her cost of equity and debt capital. In addition to project size and risk, entrepreneur’s risk aversion turns out to be a critical determinant of VC investor choice –a finding which is strongly supported by a panel analysis of VC fund flows for 5 European countries over the 2002-2009 period