XBRL for Investment Professionals

It's nearly a month that said conference took place in London, and I have yet to blog about it ... some of the reasons for that delay probably co?ncide with the reasons why a relatively small group of less than fifty professionals came together for an event that has been organised by CFA Institute, EFFAS and the IASCF, namely current market dislocations. In the face of that, an infrastructure undertaking such as XBRL takes second place with many.

Nevertheless, participants tended to be quite happy with the conference and commented favourably on the quality of the audience as well. The relatively small size of the audience made it possible for the audience to interact with each other and to participate actively in the Q&A session, which is very helpful when you're the moderator ...

Here are the presentation slides. It's a pity that David McGraw's slides are not available, because his and Homi Byramji's presentations struck a strong chord with me. In David's case it was the breadth of the potential applicability within a leading institutional investor's processes, and the challenges that XBRL has to respond to (data governance!), whereas Homi was demonstrating clearly that, other than Encyclopedia Britannica, Thomson Reuters is not going to be asleep on the wheel in the face of the challenge to the middle man posed by XBRL. Personally, I am fairly confident now that XBRL is a sustaining innovation for information intermediaries. 

Shortly before the conference, Finanz und Wirtschaft published an XBRL update that I wrote. And there is one more update: XBRL CH is now officially a provisional Jurisdiction!

Evaluating short extension funds (130/30)

The current issue of the FAJ has a great piece about How variation in signal quality affects performance. On the face of it, the article deals with the generic perception that any relaxation of investment restrictions (read: long only) will invariably result in better performance. This is the selling proposition of currently fashionable 130/30 funds. But it doesn't - or only in the special case of an information coefficient which is stable over time. Managers with unstable ICs will see their performance deteriorate with increasing short positions. 

This approach delineates a way to help evaluating 130/30 funds which do not have a long enough track record in the product (i.e. the majority of vendors), but a more significant one in long only mandates. If that track record were to exhibit an unstable IC in long only portfolios already, then there might be a problem in the short extension.

Prediction markets

Let me be explicit from the start: I have a problem with the judgmental connotations of the term speculation. In my view, there is no meaningful distinction between investing and speculating. Investing as well as speculating is about the assumption of risk in return for the uncertain possibility of reward. There is only inappropriate investment or speculation, but not bad speculation per se. 

The cause for these rather philosophical considerations is my interest for prediction markets such as intrade, where you can effectively trade in all sorts of event probabilities. Literature has it that predictions produced using a bid/ask mechanism with real money will be of significantly better quality than survey forecasts for instance. Naturally, they cannot tell the future, but they will be more efficient at processing all currently available information than any one expert. Therefore, these markets serve two important purposes: If reasonably liquid, they offer high quality, quantified predictions of event probabilities of presidential elections or hurricane landfall severities, and they offer a hedging possibility, although the liquidity is definitely a limiting factor there at this point.

It is very timely that the CFA Institute has just published the results of its last Monthly Question survey about prediction markets. 65% of respondents think that such markets offer valuable information, and a majority of 54% think that they are fit for investment purposes (mostly hedging).

Challenges in Quantitative Management

At last, I got round to finishing Challenges in Quantitative Equity Management, a freely available CFA Institute Research Foundation monograph by Fabozzi, Focardi and Jonas. The book is based on surveys and conversations with practitioners of quant management, capturing the collapse in industry outperformance following the summer of 2007. I was particularly interested to find out whether there would be any attention paid to XBRL, which I suspect should be quite relevant to quant management, but it wasn't even mentioned throughout the book. That's not to say it is considered to be irrelevant: Too many people using similar models and the same data was considered to be one of the major challenges to the quant approach going forward. 

Nevertheless, it is a worth while read for a number of thoughts and discussions, such as the distinction between quantitative and judgmental investment processes, the style correlation of quant management (which tend to be value-driven), the negative correlation between fund capacity and alpha-generation and, last but not least, the adaptive markets hypothesis as opposed to the efficient markets hypothesis. 

CFA Institute Code for Pensions

The CFA Institute has published a Code of Conduct for Members of a Pension Scheme Governing Body. The Code is intended to guide the behaviour of individuals sitting on governing bodies of pension schemes worldwide (ASIP has contributed, among others), which is why its principles are worded rather generically (see IPE story). Go to the comments section for more detailed explanation.

I find Fi360's Periodic Table of Standards of Excellence to provide a great complementary overview of best practice.

Finance 2.0

I've had the great pleasure and privilege of presenting the CFA Institute Comprehensive Business Reporting Modell as well as its position on XBRL to the 17th XBRL Conference in Eindhoven. Needless to say that this was also a great opportunity to share & discuss some thoughts about the future path of financial research with participants. 

The slides of my presentation are available here, but I'm already in the process of reworking them, taking on board new ideas from the peer discussions. My thinking goes along the lines that XBRL will be a disruptive force in finance eventually, but not in the immediate future as data intermediaries are well positioned to leverage their incumbent interfaces with the cheaper and faster fundamental information. For them, XBRL will be sustaining - for a while. That also means that most professional investors - at least those on the sell side - will not care much about XBRL since they are receiving the goods indirectly via improved third party providers. Disruption will come to them by other means, however ... I am looking forward to this conference in the fall, which should firmly establish the debate among investment professionals.

The future of public pensions

Richard Ennis' article in the current issue of the Financial Analysts Journal may be aimed at the ailment of US public pensions,  but its tenets are equally applicable to European (including Swiss) public pension plans as well. A key issue is that of valuation, where current actuarial valuations are traditionally predominant under the pretext of perennial solvency of the state sponsor. Ennis convincingly demonstrates that the "issues are the value of the obligation, the cost to extinguish it, and on whom the burden of that cost falls. In a word, the concern is accountability." From a Public Choice perspective, his tenets are unlikely to be put into action just now, unfortunately. The increasing gulf between public and private pensions will have to get wider before this can be addressed fundamentally. 

XBRL for dummies

Today, the first meeting of the XAC, the XBRL Advisory Council to the IASCF took place in London. It was a very interesting kick-off meeting, indeed! To use an IT metaphor, I like to think of Accounting Standard Setting as constructing the Operating System that the economy works on. A principles based system such as IFRS can rely on a certain degree of fuzziness and the human factor when preparers and auditors apply the standards. But when this fuzziness actually is being translated into code, then a lot of nitty-gritty stuff appears. 

During the meeting, I first got my hands on a copy of XBRL for dummies, and since the book kindly features this blog (so, it's got to be a really good book, right?), I thought I'd return the favour!

XBRL advisory council

The International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation (a.k.a. IASCF) today announced the formation of an XBRL advisory council, which I have the honour to say that I am a member of on behalf of the CFA Institute. I am looking forward to contributing my small share to the further establishment of XBRL as a major agent of change in the preparation, dissemination and use of financial reporting.

CFA Institute podcasts

The CFA Institute is revving up its web based offering with interesting educational audio content that you can subscribe to, a.k.a. podcasts. Right now, it's only the audio stream of presentations and articles, but I hope that the presentations will soon be complemented by the slides that the speakers talk about. Here are the links to the RSS feeds in iTunes: Conferences and Events, CFA Institute generated items, CFA Institute Pubs.

Getting to know XBRL

The following is the first guest contribution on this blog. Bob Schneider, its author, is the editor of Data Interactive, a blog sponsored by Hitachi to help financial professionals stay informed about developments in the world of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).

In a recent survey by the CFA Institute, some 59% of respondents said they were ?not aware? of XBRL. Even if that understates CFA Charterholders' acquaintance with the data standard, it?s undoubtedly true that many financial professionals still have little knowledge of XBRL or ? as SEC chair Christopher Cox calls it ? ?interactive data.?
As recently as within the past few weeks, XBRL taxonomies have been completed and widespread XBRL adoption is coming into view. Analysts and accountants are eager to gain an understanding of what XBRL is and what it can do.
Where can they turn to for help? Here are five resources that go beyond mere definitions and give users true insight to what XBRL can be.
An excellent place to start is Cheaper, Smarter, Faster: Benefits to Analysts from XBRL written by Christian Dreyer, who writes this blog, and Mike Willis, partner at PwC and a leading XBRL authority. Specifically directed at financial analysts, the article clearly and imaginatively describes XBRL, discusses its progress in various countries, and describes interactive data's various benefits. Although it doesn't contain the latest XBRL developments ? it was published about a year ago ? it is still the single best article on XBRL for financial professionals who are new to interactive data.
One of my favorite XBRL speakers is Liv Watson, VP of Global Strategies at EDGAR Online. Liv is one of those rare speakers who makes the dull seem interesting, and the interesting, exhilarating. In her presentation at the Third Annual XBRL Canada Conference, she uses war stories and fun asides to describe the benefits of XBRL for both external and internal reporting.
For the past year or more the most notable proponent of XBRL has been SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. In March the Commission held an Interactive Data Roundtable that included many key XBRL players, including representatives from companies participating in the Voluntary Filing Program. Ably moderated by Chicago Sun-Times journalist Terry Savage, the webcast provides listeners with an understanding of what implementing XBRL may entail and describes key XBRL issues going forward.
Interactive data comprises both XBRL-FR (for financial reporting) and XBRL-GL (for global ledger). The latter is the subject of the webcasts at GaLaPaGoS (click XBRL GL Webcasts). Two that are especially noteworthy are XBRL and SOA, a superb presentation by Walter Hamscher on why companies will need to adopt XBRL to fulfill their compliance requirements, and Eric Cohen's self-explanatory What Is the Global Ledger Good For? Uses of XBRL GL.
Finally, one more resource I'd like you to be aware of is the recently created archive of XBRL conferences at XBRL.org. Listening or reading the speeches made at these gatherings is perhaps the best way for newcomers to the field to gain an appreciation of what XBRL has to offer, as well as the most important issues in interactive data adoption.

Swiss CFA supports XBRL

The Swiss CFA Society claims to be the world's first association of financial analysts to endorse XBRL by making its own financial reports available in that format. As there is still no XBRL jurisdiction in the Swiss market, such endorsement and awareness building is of the essence.

European pensions in Korea?

CFA Korea Society has been so kind to invite me to talk to them about pan-European pensions and the conclusions to be drawn from European experience in the light of the very recent introduction of occupational pensions in Korea. Here are the slides of that presentation.

Conference presentation

A few days ago, I've had the honour to address the first IASCF conference in Asia in Singapore with a presentation about the CFA Institute's Comprehensive Business Reporting Modell in its final version.

CFA Pension Code of Conduct

The CFA Institute Centre is asking for comments on its Code of Conduct for Members of a Pension Scheme Governing Body until 15 August. The draft has been prepared with the assistance of the OECD and major trade associations from the Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

Analysts still unaware of XBRL

The CFA Centre has just given us a preliminary review of 2007 XBRL awareness survey results. From this preliminary review, it is not clear which subset of members have been sampled (yours truly cannot remember having been on it), or what the response ratio was, but a number of interesting points arise, especially in comparison with the results of the May 2006 quick survey.

The majority of analysts is still unaware of XBRL. The percentage reported is even greater than last year, but that's pretty certainly within the margin of error.

Analysts think the convergence of taxonomies - in line with the convergence of reporting standards, presumably - is very important.

Analysts value increasing information granularity, even of details included in footnotes. Just tagging the note will not do.

Analysts are wary of X, i.e. the eXtensibility in so far as they think that preparers' ability to extend the taxonomy ought to be limited and should follow a strict protocol.

As the number of XBRL-aware respondents to the survey (ca. 240) seems to have been quite small, the validity of the answers to the more specific questions may have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Lifetime financial advice

The Research Foundation of the CFA Institute has issued a new monograph on Lifetime Financial Advice - Human Capital, Asset Allocation and Insurance by four distinguished authors: Roger G. Ibbotson, Moshe A. Milevsky, Peng Chen CFA and Kevin X. Zhu. For a summary, let me quote from the foreword:

The largest asset that most human beings have, at least when they are young, is their human capital? that is, the present value of their expected future labor income. Human capital interacts with traditional investments, such as stocks, bonds, and real estate, through the correlation structure. But human capital interacts in even more interesting and profitable ways with life insurance and annuities because these assets have payoffs linked to the holder?s longevity. The authors of Lifetime Financial Advice present a framework for understanding and managing all of these assets holistically.

This complex issue is approached in a systematic, model based fashion from the perspective of the individual investor. It may not, therefore, hold as much interest to the traditional institutional investor managing retirement monies collectively. Private wealth & insurance product managers should be able to find plenty of food for thought, though. But not only them: this short monograph should be essential reading for everyone who needs to be financially literate.

Education & Innovation

On the occasion of the Swiss CFA Society's celebration of the CFA Institute's 60th anniversary, I've been asked to host a panel discussing Education & Innovation in Switzerland. The panel was composed of Prof. Manuel Ammann, Prof. Thorsten Hens and Patrick Odier (right to left). The debate covered topics such as Swiss pragmatism in adopting innovation invented elsewhere, the rôle of intellectual property in financial innovation as well as ways to bridge the gap between academic research and practice. Panelists would like to see increased flexibility in the educational landscape and more interaction between the two quite separate fields.

CFA in Financial Times

While The Economist's gold standard attribution to the CFA designation is still unmatched for sheer quotabiliy, the Financial Times' latest Financial Training Report makes up for volume since it is almost dedicated to the CFA. Here's a little excerpt: The CFA qualification can give the masters of finance degree a run for its money.

Pensions in Russia

On Tuesday this week, I had the pleasure to give a presentation on occupational pensions to the members of CFA Russia in Moscow. The presentation has been recorded and will be made available on their soon to go live website. Meanwhile, the slides are available here.

CFA Institute's XBRL page

The CFA Centre for Financial Market Integrity now has its very own XBRL page (no RSS feed, yet!) to watch. While it's great that the Institute endorses XBRL, one wonders why it is only actively involved with XBRL in one country (where the Institute happens to be domiciled) ...

CFA Institute ups the ante on XBRL

In his April letter to 80'000 Members of the CFA Institute worldwide, CEO Jeff Diermeyer gives another boost to analyst awareness of XBRL. Judge for yourself:

The Time Is Now to Look at XBRL
As I mentioned in my December letter, I am encouraged by the promise that XBRL ? an interactive data-based language that allows the tagging of financial (and potentially non-financial) information ? holds in enhancing the ability of investors to analyze companies. I believe XBRL can significantly improve the accessibility and accuracy of financial statements and, ultimately, the quality of our global capital markets.

Recently, the New York Society of Security Analysts (NYSSA) held a seminar on XBRL at Baruch College. I wish you could have joined me at the seminar where Tom Larsen, CFA, chair of our XBRL working group, delivered an informative presentation (PDF) and I provided an update (PDF) on our involvement in this area.

If you haven't already, it is now time for you to take a good look at this new technology. Fundamental analysts, portfolio managers, credit analysts, quants, risk modelers, and academics should all evaluate how XBRL may change their investment processes. XBRL has developed to a degree where it is worth your while to investigate. We will attempt to deliver this information to your doorstep or desktop, although seeing the live presentations would be most effective.

In addition, in order to accelerate adoption of XBRL by companies, I urge you to ask company management where they stand with XBRL implementation. A little nudge from many of you will pay dividends.

CFA Institute, through its Centre for Financial Market Integrity, has formed an XBRL working group of nine members from diverse investment professional backgrounds, which has been charged with three main tasks: 1) Draft a position paper on the use of XBRL-tagged data in financial reporting from the end-users' perspective; 2) Survey CFA Institute members about the key elements needed to develop and maintain a high-quality XBRL system for delivering information to investors and investment professionals; and 3) Provide detailed implementation feedback to the SEC and to XBRL US Inc., the primary organization for the development of the XBRL taxonomy for financial statements and note disclosures provided for SEC filings.

We will keep you posted of further developments.

We are certainly looking forward to that!

CFA Magazine finds

The CFA Magazine often is a good source of interesting material, written in a competent, yet conversational style. Cases in point are Stephen Brown's article about RIXML, an electronic data format similar to XBRL, but specialising on research information and therefore not quite as pervasive as XBRL, and John Rubino's excellent piece about global liquidity, providing insights into the global yield curve and failing monetary policy in the presence of free flows of capital and the carry trade.

Financial Analysts on Pensions

The January/February issue of the CFA Institute's Financial Analysts Journal is fully dedicated to pensions and retirement provision from an asset management perspective. Essential reading for all subscribers to this blog!