Loans and Mortgage Tips

Let us now comment on the value obtained for ?. Note that the broker who gets the information (e.g. a buy order from a liquidity trader) knows that it does not come from an insider. If this order were fully transferred to the market, the price would rise, since unlike broker-dealers the other agents do not know that it comes from a liquidity trader and thus revise their price estimates upwards. The broker-dealer takes advantage of this discrepancy between the market price and his own best estimate, filling the client’s order in part out of his own portfolio. He is aware that the sale will lower the price, which is why he does not fill the whole order, for if he did so, this would perfectly offset the client’s demand and the final price would be unchanged.

Thus the broker-dealer behaves like a monopolist facing a linear demand curve, and offers half the quantity demanded, so that the price is driven below the marginal cost.

Expenses during the development, protection and marketing phases of inventing do not all occur at once. There is no need to have all the money that will be spent on the project at the beginning of the process. Very few independent inventors have a surplus amount of money set aside with which to pursue their product ideas. Most of us are operating on shoestring budgets. Many have succeeded and so can you. It may be necessary to save for a while and then move to the next phase of your product development. Then save again for the next phase and so on. As you read this book – or any book that details the steps in product development – you will see that there are lots of details related to your invention that you could be doing while you are saving between expenditures. So, it isn’t as if you have to spend all of your time in a holding pattern while you accumulate the needed funds.

Brokers know that you want researched stocks recommended by experts. That is why you came to them to begin with. Each brokerage house, therefore, has its own experts rating stocks just for you. When brokers rate stocks, on average more than 65 percent are rated buy, less than 35 percent are hold, and less than 1 percent are rated sell. Every broker, therefore, has a long list of buys to show you, several of which are certain to piqué your interest.

Unfortunately, buy ratings have a dual purpose. Buy ratings sell stock to you and they sell services to companies issuing stock and bonds. In 2000, brokers made more than $30 billion dollars helping companies issue stocks and bonds. These stocks and bonds are always given buy ratings. That keeps the client coming back; it may or may not keep you coming back.

Studies show that buy-rated stocks have random returns on average no better than the market. Frequently they serve to prop up stock prices temporarily so insiders can cash out their stock options at a profit before the collapse. Insiders have to act quickly, though. According to a 2001 study by Investors.com, buy ratings on IPOs by the analysts of the underwriting firm lead to losses six months later of greater than 50 percent.

Investors also go to their broker for comfort and support during the markets down periods. Unfortunately, a full-service broker is not a financial counselor or a psychologist, but a salesperson looking for a commission. He will always have a product to sell you in an attempt to ease your discomfort.

The loan size varies from $1 million to, more recently, greater than $1.5 billion. Smaller loans allow for greater diversification and less credit risk, yet they are more difficult to analyze. Large-loan deals are typically purchased by buy-and-hold accounts, such as insurance companies and pension funds with real estate expertise, and often are preferred by these “real estate-savvy investors” as it is economical to spend the time analyzing the property.

Smaller loan deals (conduit) are more liquid and are typically purchased by total-return, mark-to-market investors that, lacking real estate experience, are more apt to rely on diversification and the rating agencies’ analysis and judgment.

Fusion deals, presently the most common type of CMBS deal, are “lumpy” conduit deals. Generally, a fusion deal has a few large loans that are typically shadow-rated investment-grade loans that are combined with a diverse pool of conduit loans. They grew in popularity after 9/11, which shut down the single-asset and large-loan type CMBS deals due to concerns that the risk of a terrorist act against one large property was too great. As a result, these large loans were split up and portions placed into various CMBS, thereby creating fusion deals. Much focus is placed on the top 10 and top 20 loans in any given deal as these can have a substantial influence on performance.

Concentration is important because it is sometimes difficult for the rating agencies to predict commercial loan defaults. The rating agencies use measures to score loan concentration and, accordingly, require more or less credit enhancement. For example, Moody’s uses the Herfindahl index to determine the effective number of loans within a pool. A pool of 100 loans that had a Herfindahl index of 65 indicates that the pool has an effective diversity of 65 loans.