Mohamad Jais

Reversed size, book-to-market and momentum effects: A review of Malaysian equity returns behavior

This paper reviews behavior of widely documented equity market return anomalies and their pricing implications in multifactor asset pricing models. We apply time series and panel tests for 24 risk—mimicking portfolios, formed over a period of 14 years. In contrast to prior findings in Malaysia, we report evidence of small firm discount, together with persisting significance of the size effect. Evidence suggests that liquidity is the source of small discount. BM effect remains significant in explaining equity returns. Regardless of the evidence of short-term momentum trading profits, we dismiss application of a risk factor to the effect of momentum anomaly. Fama-French three-factor model, while efficient than CAPM, leaves a substantial unexplained component. The paper provides insights of the source of the size effect in equity returns, and pricing debate in Malaysian market.

Leadership styles and financial services performance

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between leadership practices and organisational performance of financial leaders in Malaysia. It aims to investigate the existence of contemporary leadership styles such as transformational, transactional and leader-member exchange (LMX) in enhancing organisational performance particularly in financial services sector. Data was collected from financial services companies, comprising commercial banks, investment banks, unit trust management companies and insurance companies. SmartPLS 2.0 (M3) was applied to test the hypotheses that comprised both transformational and transactional leadership styles and also LMX on organisational performance and subsequently bootstrapping was conducted to investigate the standard error of the estimate and t-values. This research highlights the importance of leadership awareness as well as recognition of LMX as a valuable approach in achieving a better organisational performance. This study attempts to blend various leadership styles and organisational performance of financial services sector in Malaysia.