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Discussion of “Aggregate Margin Debt and the Divergence of Price from Accounting Fundamentals”
Author(s) -
Hutton Amy P.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
contemporary accounting research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.769
H-Index - 99
eISSN - 1911-3846
pISSN - 0823-9150
DOI - 10.1111/1911-3846.12315
Subject(s) - margin (machine learning) , economics , debt , aggregate (composite) , spurious relationship , stock price , monetary economics , stock (firearms) , bankruptcy , aggregate data , econometrics , financial economics , macroeconomics , finance , mechanical engineering , medicine , paleontology , materials science , pathology , machine learning , series (stratigraphy) , biology , computer science , engineering , composite material
Burger and Curtis (2017) is an empirical investigation of whether aggregate margin debt correlates with aggregate stock prices and aggregate accounting‐based fundamentals. While the paper convincingly documents a significant relation: aggregate margin debt is higher when aggregate fundamentals‐to‐price ratios are low, it fails to document why . The documented relation could exist because margin traders are the overly exuberant noise traders that push stock prices higher away from fundamental values; or the documented relation could be spurious, and exist because aggregate margin debt rises with aggregate price levels simply because margin loan capacity increases as aggregate price levels increase. With insufficiently granular data (aggregate margin debt measured monthly), the authors are not able to sort out why the relation exists. Thus, interpretation of the findings documented in this paper is difficult.