Author Archives: Rajiv Sethi

Guest Post: Market Ecology

Rajiv Sethi

The erudite and very readable RT Leuchtkafer has posted yet another comment for the Securities and Exchange Commission to digest. This one was prompted by a paper by Andrei Kirilenko, Albert Kyle, Mehrdad Samadi and Tugkan Tuzun that provides a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of trading strategies that are common in asset markets today and the manner in which they interact to determine the dynamics of asset prices.

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Guest Post: On Broken Trades and Bailouts

→ Rajiv Sethi Back in 1980, Avraham Beja and Barry Goldman published a theoretical paper in the Journal of Finance that explored the manner in which the composition of trading strategies in an asset market affects the volatility of prices. Their main insight was that if the prevalence of momentum based strategies was too large […]

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Guest Post: Rationality and Fragility in Financial Markets

→ Rajiv Sethi In a recent paper on financial innovation and fragility, Gennaioli, Shleifer and Vishny argue that investors (and often also financial intermediaries) are hobbled by certain systematic cognitive biases that cause them to neglect unlikely events when assessing asset values. They argue that such “local thinking” results in the creation and excessive issuance […]

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