Market Turbulence from Covid-19, OPEC: Maryland Smith Finance Experts Available

Looking for an expert who can lend some context to the current gyrations in the financial markets? The following experts from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business are available to speak about financial sector disruption, in the wake of the developments about Covid-19 and OPEC.

Clifford Rossi, professor of the practice. With 25-plus years of experience as both a senior executive at top financial institutions and a federal-banking regulator, Rossi says individual investors can manage their risk like a bank, by applying value-at-risk, or VaR:

“Managing your own investment risk like a bank can provide a way to quantify your appetite for risk under a wide range of outcomes in a consistent and easily understood manner…The largest and most complex commercial banks apply value-at-risk, or VaR as it is known, as a technique to establish the outer bounds of risk for their institutions…Translating that to individual investment portfolios requires having a distribution of losses in your portfolio based on a simulation of market and macroeconomic factors over time.” 

David Kass, clinical professor of finance. Kass is an expert in corporate finance. He previously served as an economist in senior positions with the Federal Trade Commission, General Accounting Office, Department of Defense, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

He recently told InvestorPlace: "The worldwide fear of the coronavirus is likely to result in the outperformance of health stocks in the near future … [but] biotech stocks trying to develop a vaccine for this virus … have already had large stocks moves to the upside. Instead of those highly visible potential beneficiaries of the spreading of this disease, I suggest looking elsewhere within the healthcare sector."

Kass, separately to the Baltimore Sun: “Most stock investors, I recommend, be long term. Short-term traders and speculators I can see being concerned. I believe the coronavirus probably will be resolved for the most part in a year, after more medical interventions are developed and available. The economy will start recovering and so would the stock market.” 

“Historically, the S&P 500, dividends included, have grown at a compounded rate of 10 percent since 1965. And, year-to-year, the SP 500, with dividends, has gone up in 80 percent of the years since 1942.”

Albert (Pete) Kyle, Charles E. Smith Chair Professor of Finance. Kyle can comment on Covid-19 effects as they relate to informed speculative trading, market manipulation, price volatility, the information content of market prices, market liquidity and contagion. Kyle served as a staff member of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms (Brady Commission, 1987), and has served as a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Economic Advisory Committee and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Technology Advisory Committee.

Elinda Kiss, associate clinical professor of finance. Kiss can discuss this topic in terms of her expertise in financial crises and personal finance. Her expanded areas of expertise include banking, banking regulation, the Federal Reserve, interest rates and student debt.