BCG vaccine is usually considered to be safe though rarely serious complications have also been reported, often incriminating contamination of the seed strain with pathogenic Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In such circumstances, it becomes prudent to rule out the contamination of the vaccine seed. M. bovis BCG can be confirmed by the absence of nitrate reductase, negative niacin test, and resistan...

The problem is to determine a review period and stocking policy that are mutually bene®cial to a producer and a retailer. In our model, the retailer uses a periodic review, base stock policy for ordering the item from the producer's Distribution Center (DC). Excess customer demand is assumed to be lost. A make-to-order production system supplies to the DC. We show that given a review period, un...

We used the Support Vector Machines in a classification approach to 'beat the market'. Given the fundamental accounting and price information of stocks trading on the Australian Stock Exchange, we attempt to use SVM to identify stocks that are likely to outperform the market by having exceptional returns. The equally weighted portfolio formed by the stocks selected by SVM has a total return of ...

Four stocks of Ehrlichia ruminantium (Welgevonden, Ball3, Nonile and Blaauwkrans), the causative agent of heartwater in domestic ruminants, were isolated into Ixodes scapularis (IDE8) tick cells using the leukocyte fraction of the blood of infected sheep. Organisms of two of the E. ruminantium stocks (Welgevonden and Blaauwkrans) propagated in IDE8 cells were also successfully used to infect bo...

We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyeror seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When measured annually, small trade order imbalance forecasts future returns; stocks heavily bought underperform ...

We examine institutional investor demand for stocks that are categorized as mispriced according to twelve well-known pricing anomalies. We find that institutional demand prior to anomaly portfolio formation is typically on the wrong side of the anomalies’ implied mispricing. That is, we find increases in institutional ownership for overvalued stocks and decreases in institutional ownership for ...

This paper proposes a dynamic risk-based model that captures the high expected returns on value stocks relative to growth stocks, and the failure of the capital asset pricing model to explain these expected returns. To model the difference between value and growth stocks, we introduce a cross-section of long-lived firms distinguished by the timing of their cash flows. Firms with cash flows weig...

This paper investigates the stock characteristic preferences of active Australian equity managers. We examine the following characteristics: stock price variance, momentum, size, transaction costs, earnings yield, analyst coverage and the standard deviation of analyst forecasts. In aggregate we find that active managers exhibit preferences for stocks exhibiting high price variance, large market...

Government bonds comove more strongly with bond-like stocks: stocks of large, mature, low-volatility, profitable, dividend-paying firms that are neither high growth nor distressed. Variables that are derived from the yield curve that are already known to predict returns on bonds also predict returns on bond-like stocks; investor sentiment, a predictor of the crosssection of stock returns, also ...

Sixteen primers were successfully used in a RAPD assay to generate reproducible fingerprints for six isolates of Cowdria ruminantium, a tick-transmitted rickettsia of ruminants. Distinction between stocks was possible by using one or at most two primers. Two stocks were very similar although originating from widely distant geographical regions. A genetic distance tree was constructed by analysi...