This paper applies a single measure of investment performance to mutual fund portfolios for the 20-year period 1948–1967. It criticizes the efficacy of market indices, at least for the purpose of evaluating aggregate results of managed portfolios; it tests the predictive value of past results in forecasting future performance; and finally, it identifies two factors that are positively related to fund performance during the time period studied.

A useful distinction is sometimes maintained between business risk associated with uncertainty of receipts generated by a firm's assets and financial risk defined as the probability of incurring penalty costs stemming from liability claims on assets and asset yields. In fact, disagreement in recent literature on the exact role of capital structure in market valuation of business firms is easily interpreted once the risk assumptions of the literature such as perfect certainty, business risk, and financial risk have been identified.

Individual decisions about investment may be regarded as choices among alternative probability distributions of net returns. It is assumed that these distributions are completely known and independent of initial wealth positions, and that individuals determine the preferred portfolio of investment in accordance with a given, consistent set of preferences.

Economic analysts following the mean-variance maxim have concentrated upon the problem of portfolios as financial assets with little or no effort being directed to the inclusion of productive liabilities. Accordingly, the usual portfolio analysis assumes the absolute level of funds available for investment as fixed and concerns itself only with the distribution of that given amount over candidate opportunities. In a wide variety of applications, neither part of this restriction is either essential or desirable. The management of insurance companies is a particularly important area that could benefit from an extension of portfolio techniques to accommodate liabilities as a variable factor. Subsequently, alternative levels of funding, through both underwriting and long-term debt, could be investigated for their attendant expected return and risk contributions to the corporation's overall financial posture.

In this paper, a simple model of individual financial decision making is used (1) to construct the market demand curve for common stock, and (2) to question the appropriateness of market value maximization as the objective of corporate financial management.

This paper discusses the use of simulation as a means of studying the operations of securities markets. To place simulation's role in the proper context, Section I begins with a review of public policy, research, and teaching considerations that have combined in recent years to create a growing need to improve our understanding of the operations of these markets. Following this is a brief discussion of the limitations of traditional price theory models to meet this need. Section II demonstrates the significant, yet largely untapped, potential of simulation in this regard.

It is often necessary to estimate a frequency function or certain points on a frequency function from very limited data. A usual procedure for this estimation involves two steps. From the set of “well-known” frequency functions, e.g., the normal, poisson, binomial, etc., one chooses that function which seems likely to best “fit” and then uses the available data to estimate the parameters of the chosen distribution. If no one “well-known” function can be chosen a priori, then perhaps several likely candidates are tried and the one which fits best according to some criterion is chosen. For many purposes, this procedure is quite unobjectionable.