Chapter 6

Are Financial
Markets Efficient?
 Chapter Preview

• Expectations are very important in our

financial system.
– Expectations of returns, risk, and liquidity
impact asset demand
– Inflationary expectations impact bond prices
– Expectations not only affect our understanding
of markets, but also how financial institutions
operate.

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 Chapter Preview

• To better understand expectations, we

examine the efficient markets hypothesis.
– Framework for understanding what information
is useful and what is not
– However, we need to validate the hypothesis
with real market data. The results are mixed,
but generally supportive of the idea.

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 Chapter Preview

• In sum, we will look at the basic reasoning

behind the efficient market hypothesis. We
also examine empirical evidence examining
this idea. Topics include:
– The Efficient Market Hypothesis
– Evidence on the Efficient Market Hypothesis
– Behavioral Finance

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 Rationale Behind the Hypothesis

• When an unexploited profit opportunity

arises on a security (so-called because, on
average, people would be earning more
than they should, given the characteristics
of that security), investors will rush to buy
until the price rises to the point that the
returns are normal again.

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 Rationale Behind
the Hypothesis (cont.)

• In an efficient market, all unexploited profit

opportunities will be eliminated.
• Not every investor need be aware of every
security and situation, as long as a few
keep their eyes open for unexploited profit
opportunities, they will eliminate the profit
opportunities that appear because in so
doing, they make a profit.

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 Stronger Version of the Efficient
Market Hypothesis
• Many financial economists take the EMH one
step further in their analysis of financial markets.
• Not only do they define an efficient market as one
in which expectations are optimal forecasts using
all available information,
• but they also add the condition that an efficient
market is one in which prices are always correct
and reflect market fundamentals (items that
have a direct impact on future income streams of
the securities)

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 Stronger Version of the Efficient Market
Hypothesis (2)

• This stronger view of market efficiency has

several important implications in the academic
field of finance:
1. It implies that in an efficient capital market, one
investment is as good as any other because the
securities’ prices are correct.
2. It implies that a security’s price reflects all
available information about the intrinsic value of
the security.

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 Stronger Version of the Efficient Market
Hypothesis (2)

3. It implies that security prices can be used by

managers of both financial and nonfinancial
firms to assess their cost of capital (cost of
financing their investments) accurately and
hence that security prices can be used to help
them make the correct decisions about whether
a specific investment is worth making or not.

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 Evidence on Efficient
Market Hypothesis

• Favorable Evidence
1. Investment analysts and mutual funds don't beat
the market
2. Stock prices reflect publicly available info:
anticipated announcements don't affect stock price
3. Stock prices and exchange rates close to random
walk;
4. Technical analysis does not outperform market

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Performance of Investment Analysts and

Mutual Funds should not be able to
consistently beat the market
– The “Investment Dartboard” often beats
investment managers.
– Mutual funds not only do not outperform the market on
average, but when they are separated into groups
according to whether they had the highest or lowest
profits in a chosen period, the mutual funds that did
well in the first period do not beat the market in the
second period.

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Performance of Investment Analysts and

Mutual Funds should not be able to
consistently beat the market
– Investment strategies using inside information is the
only “proven method” to beat the market. In the U.S., it
is illegal to trade on such information, but that is not
true in all countries.

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Do Stock Prices Reflect Publicly

Available Information as the EMH
predicts they will?
– Thus if information is already publicly available,
a positive announcement about a company will
not, on average, raise the price of its stock
because this information is already reflected in
the stock price.

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Do Stock Prices Reflect Publicly

Available Information as the EMH
predicts they will?
– Early empirical evidence confirms: favorable
earnings announcements or announcements of
stock splits (a division of a share of stock into
multiple shares, which is usually followed by
higher earnings) do not, on average, cause
stock prices to rise.

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Random-Walk Behavior of Stock Prices that

is, future changes in stock prices should, for
all practical purposes, be unpredictable
– If stock is predicted to rise, people will buy to
equilibrium level; if stock is predicted to fall, people will
sell to equilibrium level

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 Evidence in Favor
of Market Efficiency

• Technical Analysis means to study past stock

price data and search for patterns such as
trends and regular cycles, suggesting rules for
when to buy and sell stocks
– The EMH suggests that technical analysis is a waste
of time
– The simplest way to understand why? is to use the
random-walk result that holds that past stock price data
cannot help predict changes
– Therefore, technical analysis, which relies on such data
to produce its forecasts, cannot successfully predict
changes in stock prices

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 Evidence on Efficient
Market Hypothesis

• Unfavorable Evidence
1. Small-firm effect: small firms have abnormally
high returns
2. January effect: high returns in January
3. Market overreaction
4. Excessive volatility
5. Mean reversion
6. New information is not always immediately
incorporated into stock prices
• Overview
1. Reasonable starting point but not whole story

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• The Small-Firm Effect is an anomaly. Many empirical

studies have shown that small firms have earned
abnormally high returns over long periods of time,
even when the greater risk for these firms has been
considered.
– The small-firm effect seems to have diminished in recent years
but is still a challenge to the theory of efficient markets
– Various theories have been developed to explain the small-firm
effect, suggesting that it may be due to rebalancing of portfolios
by institutional investors, tax issues, low liquidity of small-firm
stocks, large information costs in evaluating small firms, or an
inappropriate measurement of risk for small-firm stocks

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• The January Effect is the tendency of

stock prices to experience an abnormal
positive return in the month of January
that is predictable and, hence,
inconsistent with random-walk behavior

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• Investors have an incentive to sell stocks before the end

of the year in December because they can then take
capital losses on their tax return and reduce their tax
liability. Then when the new year starts in January, they
can repurchase the stocks, driving up their prices and
producing abnormally high returns.
• Although this explanation seems sensible, it does not
explain why institutional investors such as private pension
funds, which are not subject to income taxes, do not take
advantage of the abnormal returns in January and buy
stocks in December, thus bidding up their price and
eliminating the abnormal returns.

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• Market Overreaction: recent research suggests that

stock prices may overreact to news announcements
and that the pricing errors are corrected only slowly
– When corporations announce a major change in earnings, say, a
large decline, the stock price may overshoot, and after an initial
large decline, it may rise back to more normal levels over a period
of several weeks.
– This violates the EMH because an investor could earn abnormally
high returns, on average, by buying a stock immediately after a
poor earnings announcement and then selling it after a couple of
weeks when it has risen back to normal levels.

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• Excessive Volatility: the stock market appears to display

excessive volatility; that is, fluctuations in stock prices
may be much greater than is warranted by fluctuations in
their fundamental value.
– Researchers have found that fluctuations in the S&P 500 stock
index could not be justified by the subsequent fluctuations in the
dividends of the stocks making up this index.
– Other research finds that there are smaller fluctuations in stock
prices when stock markets are closed, which has produced a
consensus that stock market prices appear to be driven by factors
other than fundamentals.

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• Mean Reversion: Some researchers have

found that stocks with low returns today tend
to have high returns in the future, and
vice versa.
– Hence stocks that have done poorly in the past are
more likely to do well in the future because mean
reversion indicates that there will be a predictable
positive change in the future price, suggesting that
stock prices are not a random walk.
– Newer data is less conclusive; nevertheless, mean
reversion remains controversial.

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 Evidence Against Market Efficiency

• New Information Is Not Always Immediately

Incorporated into Stock Prices
– Although generally true, recent evidence suggests that,
inconsistent with the efficient market hypothesis, stock
prices do not instantaneously adjust to profit
announcements.
– Instead, on average stock prices continue to rise for
some time after the announcement of unexpectedly
high profits, and they continue to fall after surprisingly
low profit announcements.

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 Case: Foreign Exchange Rates

• Could you make a bundle if you could

predict FX rates? Of course.
• EMH predicts, then, that FX rates should
be unpredictable.
• Oddly enough, that is exactly what
empirical tests show – FX rates are not
very predictable.

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 Mini-Case: Ivan Boesky

• In the 1980s, Mr. Boesky made millions of

dollars for himself and his investors by
investing in take-over targets. Did he
disprove the efficient market hypothesis by
predicting who would be take-over targets
in the coming months?

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 Mini-Case: Ivan Boesky

• Hardly. In 1986, Mr. Boesky was charged

with insider trading. This does show that
you can make money on information
others don’t have…

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