Rasheed is a post-doctoral researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Endowment Asset Management. His work on the formation and regulation of modern markets, 'The Government of Markets', was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an explanation and evidence for the recent lack of retail financial product failures in Canada in the face of a (formal) regulatory failure. Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies the literature on self-regulation and reputational risk management to a detailed investigation of the marketing of financial products to Canadian retail investors. Internal approval processes for many different players in the retail financial industry were analyzed in detail primarily using interviews. Findings – The author was able to identify associations between structures and policies at financial firms and outcomes for retail investors. Knowing that prevention is more effective than mitigation, marketers of financial products would generally welcome increased state intervention in terms of more and better information disclosures. Research limitations/implications – The research contributes to our understanding of self-regulation in financial markets, specifically addressing what firm characteristics may be related to positive and negative outcomes for small investors in complex structured financial products. Practical implications – Regulators may be able to imply the research findings in selectively allocating scarce resources to policing firms that may be more inclined to participate in riskier behavior. Financial firms may be able to influence the decisions relating to how regulations are designed and implemented and which products are sold to which clients to minimize reputation risk. Originality/value – This is the first time, to the author's knowledge, that the reputation risk management channel has been analyzed in terms of influencing outcomes for retail (small) investors.

Wholesale re-examination of the link between commodities futures prices and inflation from 1929-1932  Emphasises the importance of rigorous attention to market microstructure when using data from commodities exchanges  Agricultural commodity markets did adjust to deflationary expectations by late 1930  Clarifies the appropriate use of futures price in forecasting wider economic trendsThis paper reexamines the use of US commodity futures price data to show that the US deflation of 1929 to 1932 was at best no more than partially anticipated by economic actors. By focusing on the expected real interest rate, previous studies provide some empirical support for explanations of the Great Depression that are not exclusively monetary in nature. However, these studies did not consider the 2 context and the market microstructures from which the data was sourced. Our analysis suggests that it is more likely that agricultural commodity markets adjusted to deflationary expectations by the end of 1930. Evidence from commodities futures markets, such as the Chicago Board of Trade, therefore should not be used to critique the Keynesian challenge to the classical monetarist explanation of the Great Depression.

It is often thought that the arrival of the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) model of option pricing in the early 1970s allowed traders to understand how to price and value options with greater precision. However, our study suggests that interwar commodity options traders may have been able to intuit ‘fair’ value and to adjust their prices to changes in the market environment well before the advent of this innovative model. A scarcity of historical price data has limited empirical tests of option price efficiency well before BSM to studies of stock options in the 1870s and the early twentieth century which revealed contrasting findings. This study deals with option pricing in a different market—commodities—during the interwar period. We conclude that option prices were closer to their BSM theoretical values than prior studies suggest. Institutional differences between interwar commodity options markets and stock options markets in the 1870s and the early twentieth century may partly account for this result. Furthermore, we find that interwar option prices were no more mispriced than in modern times, and were as sensitive to changes in volatility—the key valuation parameter in the BSM model.