Friend-of-the-BLPB Bernie Sharfman and his co-author Vincent Deluard recently posted their article, How Discretionary Decision-Making Has Created Performance and Legal Disclosure Issues for the S&P 500 Index, on SSRN.  The article plays to several audiences, as noted by the authors.  The SSRN abstract follows:

When investment funds track the S&P 500, the index becomes more than just a list of 500 companies. The focus then turns to the financial and regulatory issues that arise from the discretionary decision-making of its Index Committee. The discussion of these issues and their implications should be of extreme interest to both investors and regulators. This discussion involves: how Sharpe’s equality will hold in practice, what kind of companies may still be impacted by the index effect, how we are to understand the expected returns versus risk of a broad based market portfolio, whether funds that track the S&P 500 are to be considered actively managed or passive, the S&P 500’s suitability as an “appropriate” benchmark index, and what kind of legal disclosures are required in the use of the index. As a result of our discussion, including our empirical findings, we do not find the S&P 500 index to be desirable for either…

Judge Rakoff’s decision in In re Nine West LBO Securities Litigation, 2020 WL 7090277 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 4, 2020) is all the rage these days.  The short version is that Nine West was taken private in a leveraged buyout by Sycamore; as part of the deal, allegedly the Sycamore buyers caused the company to sell the profitable subsidiaries to its own affiliates for less than they were worth, and the whole thing ended in Nine West’s bankruptcy.  In the wake of all of this, the debtholders (many of whom held debt that predated the sale), via the litigation trustee, sued Nine West’s former directors – the ones who had approved the sale – for violating their fiduciary duties by negotiating a deal that would result in the company’s bankruptcy.  Last year, Judge Rakoff refused to dismiss the claims, in a decision that spawned a thousand law firm updates about directors’ duties when selling the company.

But what I find interesting is how little anyone – including Judge Rakoff – seems to have interrogated the legal question of to whom the directors’ fiduciary duties were owed.

The classic Delaware formulation is that directors owe a duty to advance the…

Just posting to let everyone know that Tulane will be hosting a virtual Corporate and Securities Roundtable on March 13, featuring a Zoom discussion of works-in-progress by professors from across the country.   The full program is listed below; you can register for this (free) event by clicking here.  (Sorry, no CLE for this one; join us for the love of scholarship!)

In a prior post, I reflected on evidence that motives other than profit seeking may be driving some of the recent social-media-driven “meme” trading in stocks such as GameStop. Indeed, many of these traders have publicized that they are buying and holding their positions as a form of social, political, or aesthetic expression.

We typically classify retail traders as either investors or speculators. Investors are those who research a stock’s fundamentals and buy it with the expectation that it will perform well over time. Speculators are less concerned with a stock’s fundamentals than its potential for volatility in price (up or down). A speculator looks to anticipate how other traders in a stock will react to price movements or market events and trade accordingly, sometimes entering and exiting the same position in a single trading session. Though they employ different strategies, the principal goal for both the investor and the speculator is to profit from their trading.

The recent meme-trading phenomenon, however, suggests that a new category of retail trader has emerged, the “expressive trader.” An expressive trader is one who does not trade for profit, but rather to send a message or produce a social/aesthetic effect. Social media…

Four leading scholars (Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, & Eric Talley) recently released a new paper, entitled Cleaning Corporate Governance.  This is the abstract:

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance,

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