Investors sometimes sue publicly traded companies, executives, accountants and underwriters alleging that important information concerning the companies was omitted or misrepresented thereby causing the investors to pay too much for the companies’ securities. Financial economists assist fact finders in determining whether allegedly omitted or misrepresented information was truly important or ‘material.’ This is done with the use of event studies or by reference to published scientific literature. Financial economists help the parties reach settlements by estimating alleged damages. Alleged damages depend on the amount by which a company’s stock price was allegedly inflated and the number of shares that were bought at fraudulently inflated prices. In these slides, SLCG outlines the major issues in estimating alleged damages in securities class action lawsuits.

A perfect storm of soaring equity values and historically low interest rates has sparked a borrowing binge among securities investors. Securities-based loans (“SBLs”) are a very attractive product for the broker-dealers who market them. However, SBLs impose substantial risks on borrowers. These risks are easy to overlook in a buoyant market but will eventually wreak havoc on the financial wellbeing of investors who are not prepared to withstand the next bear market. In this paper, Paul Meyer reviews the types of lending in which broker-dealers engage, describes how SBLs are regulated and marketed, and points out the considerable risks borne by a customer who borrows against his savings.

Published in the Financial Services Review, Volume 23, Number 3, 2014.

This paper examines the properties and valuation of market-linked certificates of deposit (structured CDs). Structured CDs are similar to structured products — debt securities with payoffs linked to market indexes — but while structured products have garnered significant interest in both the financial media and in the academic literature, structured CDs have received relatively little attention. We review the market for structured CDs in the United States and provide valuations for several common product types. Using our methodology, we find significant mispricing of several common types of structured CDs across multiple issuers, which is similar in magnitude to the well-documented mispricing in the structured products market. In particular, we estimate that structured CDs are typically worth approximately 93% of the value of a contemporaneously issued fixed-rate CD. These results suggest that unsophisticated investors may not understand the value, risks, and subtleties of these ostensibly conservative investments.