This paper examines the capital structure implications of market timing. I isolate timing attempts in a single major financing event, the initial public offering, by identifying market timers as firms that go public in hot issue markets. I find that hot-market IPO firms issue substantially more equity, and lower their leverage ratios by more, than cold-market firms do. However, immediately afte...

Existing literature has found no evidence of market-timing ability by mutual funds using tests based on fund returns. This paper proposes alternative market-timing tests based on observed fund holdings. The holdings-based measures are shown to be more powerful than the return-based measures, and are not subject to “artificial timing” bias. Applying the holdings-based tests, we find strong evide...

We propose market timing strategies aiming to exploit the aggregate accruals’ return forecasting power. We examine several performance metrics of the aggregate accruals based market timing strategy such as excess portfolio return, Sharpe ratio, and Jensen’s alpha. We provide robust evidence that, relative to the passive investment strategy of buying and holding the stock market, the market timi...

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Portfolio managers claim to be able to generate abnormal returns through either superior asset selection or market timing. The Treynor and Mazuy (TM) model is the mostly used return-based approach to isolate market timing skills, but all existing corrections of the regression intercept can be manipulated by a manager who can trade derivatives. We revisit the TM model by applying the original op...

This paper considers the optimal market entry timing of a firm facing price uncertainty and investment irreversibility. When the entry decision is made, the firm has to pay the necessary investment costs and from then onwards will receive the expected future cash-flows. The total expected income of the investment is given by the sum over time of the expected discounted future cash-flows. For th...

In this paper, we present a few simple market-timing strategies that appear to outperform the “buy-and-hold” strategy, with real-time data from 1970 to 2000. Our focus is on spreads between the E/P ratio of the S&P 500 index and interest rates. Extremely low spreads, as compared to their historical ranges, appear to predict higher frequencies of subsequent market downturns in monthly data. We c...