Financial analysts play an ambivalent role on financial markets: On the one hand investors and the media frequently follow their advice, on the other hand they are regularly discredited when their forecasts or recommendations prove to be erroneous. This cumulative thesis explores the informational content of financial analysts’ forecasts for investors by addressing three specific topics: Consensus size as a rudimentary investment signal, the association of analysts’ target prices with business sentiment, and the consistency of analysts’ different investment signals in the context of the 2008 financial crisis. Overall, the thesis provides additional evidence that investors can profit from analysts’ forecasts and recommendations. However, it is also shown that investors need to be very selective about which signal to rely on and in which context to use these because analysts’ investment signals can also be heavily biased and erroneous. About the author: Jan-Philipp Matthewes studied ‘Economics’ at the University of Cologne, Germany, and holds a Dean’s Award from the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. His research focus on financial analysts evolved while working in equity research at a leading German bank. The PhD-thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Martin Wallmeier, Finance and Accounting, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Since 2013 Jan-Philipp Matthewes is the managing director of the boutique private equity firm ‘Matthewes Capital Invest GmbH’.

The ways financial analysts, traders, and other specialists use information and learn from each other are of fundamental importance to understanding how markets work and prices are set. This graduate-level textbook analyzes how markets aggregate information and examines the impacts of specific market arrangements--or microstructure--on the aggregation process and overall performance of financial markets. Xavier Vives bridges the gap between the two primary views of markets--informational efficiency and herding--and uses a coherent game-theoretic framework to bring together the latest results from the rational expectations and herding literatures. Vives emphasizes the consequences of market interaction and social learning for informational and economic efficiency. He looks closely at information aggregation mechanisms, progressing from simple to complex environments: from static to dynamic models; from competitive to strategic agents; and from simple market strategies such as noncontingent orders or quantities to complex ones like price contingent orders or demand schedules. Vives finds that contending theories like informational efficiency and herding build on the same principles of Bayesian decision making and that "irrational" agents are not needed to explain herding behavior, booms, and crashes. As this book shows, the microstructure of a market is the crucial factor in the informational efficiency of prices. Provides the most complete analysis of the ways markets aggregate information Bridges the gap between the rational expectations and herding literatures Includes exercises with solutions Serves both as a graduate textbook and a resource for researchers, including financial analysts

The three volume set LNCS 8226, LNCS 8227, and LNCS 8228 constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2013, held in Daegu, Korea, in November 2013. The 180 full and 75 poster papers presented together with 4 extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. These papers cover all major topics of theoretical research, empirical study and applications of neural information processing research. The specific topics covered are as follows: cognitive science and artificial intelligence; learning theory, algorithms and architectures; computational neuroscience and brain imaging; vision, speech and signal processing; control, robotics and hardware technologies and novel approaches and applications.

Financial Behavior: Players, Services, Products, and Markets provides a synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature on the financial behavior of major stakeholders, financial services, investment products, and financial markets. The book offers a different way of looking at financial and emotional well-being and processing beliefs, emotions, and behaviors related to money. The book provides important insights about cognitive and emotional biases that influence various financial decision-makers, services, products, and markets. With diverse concepts and topics, the book brings together noted scholars and practitioners so readers can gain an in-depth understanding about this topic from experts from around the world. In today's financial setting, the discipline of behavioral finance is an ever-changing area that continues to evolve at a rapid pace. This book takes readers through the core topics and issues as well as the latest trends, cutting-edge research developments, and real-world situations. Additionally, discussion of research on various cognitive and emotional issues is covered throughout the book. Thus, this volume covers a breadth of content from theoretical to practical, while attempting to offer a useful balance of detailed and user-friendly coverage. Those interested in a broad survey will benefit as will those searching for more in-depth presentations of specific areas within this field of study. As the seventh book in the Financial Markets and Investment Series, Financial Behavior: Players, Services, Products, and Markets offers a fresh looks at the fascinating area of financial behavior.

The following work identifies a new source of quantifiable risk in financial applications. Traditional economic and financial theories tend to ignore the limits on information communication and computation with notable exceptions such as Sims(2010). This is in spite of the fact that the science of such limits is well understood. Information and information processing have been treated qualitatively as either perfect or imperfect with little effort to incorporate them in a precise and practical way. Over the years this omission has become even more egregious given the data driven and digitally dominated world in which the vast majority of financial activity takes place. In addition to building new theoretical foundations, practical applications of the theory to problems in finance are suggested in this work. In the first chapter the concept of the economy's information processing efficiency is intuitively introduced. The theory is expanded in Chapter 2 which explores the relationships between the arrival and processing rates of information at financial markets. This analysis is used to demonstrate mathematically how financial flash crashes can occur without large changes in the information arrival process. In chapter 3 the economy's information processing efficiency (R/C) is theoretically and empirically derived from a reformulation of the yield curve. The theory is also intuitively extended to explain in a new way the large-scale declines in the markets typically seen at the end of business cycles. The full evolution of the business cycle is described from the perspective of this new theory and measure in Chapter 4. The new measure is used in Chapter 5 to improve portfolio management over business cycles in conjunction with more traditional methods. The fractal structure of R/C is explored mathematically and explained metaphorically in Chapter 6. In the last chapter the theory elucidates a previously unknown and important connection between the disparate branches of finance and opens many new vistas for future research and real-world applications.

Financial Analysts' Forecasts and Stock Recommendations reviews research related to the role of financial analysts in the allocation of resources in capital markets. The authors provide an organized look at the literature, with particular attention to important questions that remain open for further research. They focus research related to analysts' decision processes and the usefulness of their forecasts and stock recommendations. Some of the major surveys were published in the early 1990's and since then no less than 250 papers related to financial analysts have appeared in the nine major research journals that we used to launch our review of the literature. The research has evolved from descriptions of the statistical properties of analysts' forecasts to investigations of the incentives and decision processes that give rise to those properties. However, in spite of this broader focus, much of analysts' decision processes and the market's mechanism of drawing a useful consensus from the combination of individual analysts' decisions remain hidden in a black box. What do we know about the relevant valuation metrics and the mechanism by which analysts and investors translate forecasts into present equity values? What do we know about the heuristics relied upon by analysts and the market and the appropriateness of their use? Financial Analysts' Forecasts and Stock Recommendations examines these and other questions and concludes by highlighting area for future research.