Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) account for half of the employment in developing economies and are a significant part of their economic growth. In spite of this, SMEs are under-financed by banks, which have been disrupted by financial technology (fintech) firms. This qualitative multi-case study examines how Indian banks are utilising digitalisation, soft information, and Big data to improve SME financing. The participants shared their insights on the way banks adopt digital tools, sources of soft information (e.g., customer and supplier relationships, business plans), and factors that influence the implementation of Big data in the SME credit evaluation process. The major themes include: banks are improving SME financing operations through digitalisation, and IT tools can verify SME soft information. Soft information attributes that emerge from addressing SME information opacity include supplier relationships, customer relationships, business plans, and managerial successions. For SME credit managers, developing partnerships to access publicly available soft information created by industry associations and "online B2B trade platforms" is a high-priority recommendation. To enhance the efficiency of SME financing, banks should obtain the consent of SMEs before they access their private hard information through trade platforms.
This study investigates stock recommendations from the three largest finance subreddits on Reddit: wallstreetbets, investing and stocks. A simple strategy that buys recommended stocks weighted by the number of posts per day yields a portfolio with higher average returns at the expense of higher risks than the market for all holding periods, i.e., unfavorable Sharpe ratios. Furthermore, the strategy leads to positive (insignificant) short-term and negative (significant) long-term alphas when considering common risk factors. This is consistent with the idea of "meme stocks", meaning that the recommended stocks are artificially inflated in the short term when they are recommended, and that the posts contain no information about long-term success. However, it is likely that Reddit users, especially on the subreddit wallstreetbets, have preferences for bets which are not captured by the mean-variance framework. Therefore, we draw on cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We find that the CPT-valuations of the Reddit portfolio exceed those of the market, which may explain the persistent attractiveness for investors to follow social media stock recommendations despite the unfavorable risk-return ratio.
Determining and minimizing risk exposure pose one of the biggest challenges in the financial industry as an environment with multiple factors that affect (non-)identified risks and the corresponding decisions. Various estimation metrics are utilized towards robust and efficient risk management frameworks, with the most prevalent among them being the Value at Risk (VaR). VaR is a valuable risk-assessment approach, which offers traders, investors, and financial institutions information regarding risk estimations and potential investment insights. VaR has been adopted by the financial industry for decades, but the generated predictions lack efficiency in times of economic turmoil such as the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, which in turn affects the respective decisions. To address this challenge, a variety of well-established variations of VaR models are exploited by the financial community, including data-driven and data analytics models. In this context, this paper introduces a probabilistic deep learning approach, leveraging time-series forecasting techniques with high potential of monitoring the risk of a given portfolio in a quite efficient way. The proposed approach has been evaluated and compared to the most prominent methods of VaR calculation, yielding promising results for VaR 99% for forex-based portfolios.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42521-022-00050-0.
Cryptocurrencies represent a new and important class of investments but are associated with asymmetric distributions and extreme price changes. We use a modeling structure where higher-order moments (scale, skewness and kurtosis) are time-varying, and additionally we used nontraditional innovations distributions to study the return series of the most important cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Based on the estimation of a series of Generalized Autoregressive Score (GAS) models, we compare predictive performance using a loss function based on Value at Risk performance.