This thesis will first criticize standard financial theory. The focus will be on return distributions, efficient market hypothesis and the independence of returns. Part two gives the intuition to look at markets in a different view. Namely the one proposed by B. Mandelbrot who has shown that...

The first essay examines news and the cross section of returns. Using a sentiment score provided by Thomson Reuters to measure the tone of news articles, this paper examines monthly portfolio returns constructed from information about past news articles. The sentiment score is obtained from the...