Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
11
result(s) for
"Sanfilippo, Eleonora"
Sort by:
Keynes's trading on Wall Street: did he follow the same behaviour when investing for himself and for King's?
In the last few years Keynes's investment activity, both as an individual trader and as a manager of institutions’ portfolios, has attracted attention in the specialised literature. Recently his investments on Wall Street, in particular – both on his own account (Cristiano, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2018) and on behalf of King's College, Cambridge (Chambers and Kabiri 2016) – have been analysed, and the evident connection with his theoretical analysis of the functioning of the financial markets contained in chapter 12 of The General Theory has been duly stressed. This article aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of Keynes's trading behaviour on Wall Street by providing a detailed comparison of his investment choices when he traded for himself and for King's. There are similarities, as might be expected, but also significant differences, well worth investigating. As far as the differences are concerned, one of the most striking is to be seen, for instance, in his attitude when, after a period of bull market in 1936, he had to face the spring 1937 burst of the speculative bubble and subsequent recession. Analysis of his behaviour in this specific case reveals that the event took him by surprise but his reaction differed with regard to his personal investments and the King's investments. The prevalence of a ‘buy and hold’ strategy, which, according to Chambers and Kabiri's reconstruction (2016), marked Keynes's behaviour in general (and also in this particular case) when he invested on behalf of King's, was not always his typical choice when the investments were undertaken on his own account. A tentative explanation of this result, which is also grounded on some different features characterising the two portfolios and not sufficiently investigated in previous studies, is at last provided in the article.
Journal Article
WHY WAS KEYNES KEEN TO INVEST IN AMERICAN BUT NOT IN BRITISH INVESTMENT TRUSTS?
The literature on John Maynard Keynes’s activity as an investor has substantially grown in the last decade (e.g., Chambers and Dimson 2013; Accominotti and Chambers 2016; Chambers and Kabiri 2016; Cristiano, Marcuzzo, and Sanfilippo 2018; Marcuzzo and Rosselli 2018; Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016, [2020] 2022). The contribution of the present paper is to investigate a specific feature of Keynes’s investment activity on his own account: his preference for American rather than British Investment Trusts. While this feature has also been observed in his investments on behalf of King’s College (Chambers and Kabiri 2016), we focus here on his personal portfolio, and we also provide a set of possible explanations for his preference. We maintain that some reasons have to do with the different structure and characteristics of the Investment Trusts in the two countries. Others relate more closely to the kind of investment policy typically adopted by the American Investment Trusts, which was much more in line with Keynes’s own approach to investment—especially regarding the stocks selection. We also attribute a role to his epistemological approach, i.e., the view that, although a full and perfect knowledge is not reachable by individuals due to the radical uncertainty characterizing the environment (“we simply don’t know,” Keynes 1937) and to the limitations of the human mind, reliable information remains, however, a guide for rational decision making, also in financial markets. Following this approach, as we will show, Keynes preferred to delegate his investment choices in the US stock market to those professionals—the managers of the Investment Trusts—who possessed, in his opinion, the wider set of reliable information on that market, while keeping for himself the investment choices in the UK stock market.
Journal Article
Keynes and the interwar commodity option markets
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, options began to be widely employed in the main financial centres in Europe and the USA for trading in spot and futures markets. From 1921 onward, Keynes embarked upon investment in these derivatives mainly—but not exclusively—in the commodity markets, showing a true fascination for this method of speculation. This type of financial investment he pursued mainly in the 1920s, with only a few operations undertaken during the 1930s. The option markets in which Keynes traded were metals—in particular copper, lead, spelter and, especially, tin. Besides metals, Keynes dealt in options also in other commodity markets, such as rubber and linseed oil, and sparingly in ordinary stocks and government securities. In this paper we offer a reconstruction of Keynes's speculative activity in commodity options, drawing on the archival material kept in the Keynes Papers held at King's College, Cambridge. This reconstruction is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely new to the literature and aims to provide an analysis of this particular aspect of Keynes's investment behaviour, investigating his capacity to predict market trends and offering a preliminary assessment of his performance.
Journal Article
KEYNES'S PERSONAL INVESTMENTS IN THE WHEAT FUTURES MARKETS, 1925-1935
The present article contributes to the strand of recent literature devoted to reconstruction of John Maynard Keynes's operations in commodity markets, currencies and stock exchange markets. Specifically, our work offers, for the first time, a comprehensive account of Keynes's personal dealings in wheat futures in the market places of Winnipeg, Chicago and Liverpool in the years from 1925 to 1935. Our reconstruction of Keynes's trading activity benefits from archival research at King's College (Cambridge, UK) where the Keynes Papers are kept. Moreover, in order to form a full picture of the markets in which Keynes was operating we reconstructed the historical series of spot and future prices. The result marks an advance in thorough examination of Keynes's speculative style in a complex international environment, as was the wheat futures market in the interwar period. One of the main findings of the article is the fact that Keynes adopted a completely different strategy when operating on the North-American markets in the 1920s from the approach he followed trading on the Liverpool market in the 1930s. In the former case he tried to anticipate reversal in the price trend, aiming at 'beating the market' and acting prevalently as a short-term investor. In the latter, he followed a long-term roll-over strategy (that is, with renewal of long positions) more consistent with his own theoretical representation of the speculator as a «risk-bearer» (Keynes 1923). Our reconstruction of Keynes's operations in the wheat futures markets constitute further confirmation of the view — shared in the literature (Chambers and Dimson 2013, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016) — that a change occurred in Keynes's speculative style (both in stocks and in commodities) around the beginning of the 1930s, when he abandoned a short-term type investment behaviour in favour of a long-term investor perspective.
Journal Article
Behavioral Foundations for the Keynesian Consumption Function
This paper has two main goals. The first is to show that behavioral rather than maximizing principles emerge from textual analysis as the microeconomic foundations for Keynes's Consumption Theory; the second goal is to demonstrate that it is possible to ground a Keynesian-type aggregate Consumption function on the basis of (some of) the principles underlying contemporary behavioral models
Paper
Attachment Style and Childhood Traumatic Experiences Moderate the Impact of Initial and Prolonged COVID-19 Pandemic: Mental Health Longitudinal Trajectories in a Sample of Italian Women
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has not been clarified yet, with multiple studies warranting a special focus on women and young adults. A sample of 101 Italian women recruited from the general population was evaluated a few weeks before the onset of the pandemic and during the first and the second wave of the pandemic. Depression values at the Brief Symptom Inventory showed an initial increase followed by a stabilization on higher values in respect to the baseline, whereas Phobic Anxiety was stably worsened. Participants with insecure attachment styles and childhood trauma showed higher levels of distress at all timepoints. In many psychopathological domains, moderation analysis showed an unfavorable trend over time for younger participants. The present study seems to confirm a high burden on mental health for women during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting young age, insecure attachment style, and childhood trauma as negative prognostic factors.
Journal Article