Market Timing Ability of Bond-Equity Yield Ratio : A study of trading strategies in Japan, Malaysia and Singapore

Abstract: Market Timing Strategy is an active investment strategy, which is based on the signals of indicators, for the investors to make their investment decisions. However, there has always been the question on which variable is a good indicator, that would provide superior returns for the investment. Bond to Equity Yield Ratio (BEYR) is a new indicator widely researched by many academics in the field of finance and extensively applied by practitioners of the financial markets during the last two decades. Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is a theory in finance which states that stock prices are always reflected with the relevant information and beating the market from predicting the trend of future stock prices is not possible. Therefore, if the market is in accordance with EMH, market timing strategy is not useful and passive investment strategy is better than active investment strategy. Although extant literatures have proved BEYR as a good indicator to be used in market timing strategy, the focus of the existing research is on the financial markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Europe; the study on Asian financial markets is very limited. The main objective of the research is mainly motivated by this knowledge gap. This study will use extreme value strategy as an active trading strategy to conduct research on the market timing ability of BEYR in three Asian financial markets: Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. In addition, passive trading strategy will be used to compare with active trading strategy in each country to identify whether the markets comply with weak form of EMH. Deductive approach of quantitative research is conducted and three main hypotheses are developed to achieve the research objective. The empirical findings from our research and the responses to the main hypotheses can be summarized as active trading strategy does perform better than passive trading strategy for all countries and the market timing ability of BEYR is not as good as the traditional indicators: dividend yields and earning yields for all countries. Therefore, the financial markets of all counties under scrutiny do not comply with weak form of EMH. However, it is worthy to take note that the sample period chosen for this research includes the period when the Global Financial Crisis occurred in 2008. Therefore, it is assumed that the impact of the financial crisis is the main reason contributing the difference between the findings from our research and the existing literatures. Moreover, the difference in the nature of financial market can be considered as another underlying factor for the new perspective on BEYR resulting from our empirical results.