China’s banking market is one of the most attractive investment targets for financial institutionsworldwide especially since the opening up of the market in December 2006. Based oninterviews with experts this paper analyses the question of benefits and risks of foreign directinvestments into...

The work report first describes the current developments on the German market for nonperformingloans, which after its peak in spring 2007 is now also affected by the financialcrisis. The sale of small and medium-size portfolios is described within the scope of a casestudy. Furthermore, the...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) were established in Europe in 2000 and have grown to a sizeof over 200 bn US$. Some issuers use a full replication strategy while others prefer a swapbased approach. The ETF are dealt parallelly in the primary and in the secondary market, asnew ETFs can be created at...

This working paper surveys theoretical and empirical work about market liquidityand market liquidity risk. It addresses interested practitioners as well asstudents who want to gain a quick overview about the latest progress in researchin market liquidity.

Today, the investment into indices has become a widely used strategy in portfolio management.While Index Funds and ETFs try to represent the performance of a single index, otherportfolio strategies use indices as portfolio components to concentrate on the allocation task.Because an index cannot...

The paper examines the key drivers of gold investment. Since 2000 the gold price has risendrastically, making gold an interesting add-on to a portfolio. As gold futures have negativeroll returns, gold pool accounts are characterized by high credit risk and physical possessionof gold means high...

Hedge Funds are often considered as a possibility for optimizing traditional portfolios due to their alternative risk factors and sources of return. But as the return distribution of hedge funds shows negative skewness and excess kurtosis, using portfolio optimization techniques, based on the...

The aim of portfolio insurance strategies is to put a floor on the value of a stock portfolio byprogressively selling stocks and buy safe, short-term debt securities as stock prices fall. Thispaper analyzes the current static and dynamic methods in use and explains their pros andcons.

This paper analyzes the current use of incentive-fee-concepts for mutual funds inGermany. Following an empirical analysis about the relevance of these methods,the different methods of calculation and the influence of different parameters aredescribed. Further on it explains the impacts of...

The paper deals with the evaluation of Collateralized Debt Obligations forinvestment purposes. CDOs are classified in the asset backed environment. Itsspecific risks (market, timing, recovery, agency) are discussed. To understand theportfolio aspect, the concept of the diversity score is...