Although bonds are less volatile than equities and the median bond fund holds about 200 bonds, bond investors still need to hold more than one bond fund to realize the optimal benefit of diversification. The simulation results show that three to five bond funds reduce standard deviation of...

The seminal work by Markowitz in 1959 introduced portfolio theory to the world. The prevailing notion since then has been that portfolio risk is non linear i.e. you cannot use Linear Programming (LP) to optimize your portfolio. We will in this paper show that simple portfolio drawdown...

The goal of this paper is to present an original and simple analysis aimed to understand why investing in capital markets can be very dangerous for "naive investors". Stock markets display often exploding volatility. They are characterized by instability and subject to external shocks. If...

This paper examines both the linear and nonlinear causal relationships between crude oil price changes and stock market returns for the United States. In particular, the study applied a battery of unit root tests to ascertain the time series properties of crude oil price changes and stock market...

The liquidity of an asset in modern financial markets is a key and, yet, elusive concept. A market is often said to be liquid when the prevailing structure of transactions provides a prompt and secure link between the demand and supply of assets, thus delivering low costs of transaction....

This paper examines the factors that affect inflows - outflows of capital in bond mutual funds that operated in the Greek market during the period 1997-2005. Investors in bond mutual funds do not seek for high gross returns in order to determine their investment decisions in contrast with...

Passive investment strategies basically aim to replicate an underlying benchmark. Thereby, the management usually selects a subset of stocks being employed in the optimization procedure. Apart from the optimization procedure, the stock selection approach determines the stock portfolios's...

Even though a random walk process is from a statistical point of view not predictable, some movements can be correlated with specific events concerning other variables. Then, predictable patterns may arise being dependent on this joint event. There is evidence given that equity price busts being...

This paper shows that most admired companies generate admirable stock performance relative to the market. The current study analyses risk premiums and risk-adjusted excess returns of a portfolio of firms ranked as the most admired companies in the United States from 2006 to 2011. The results...

Hedging under a parallel shift of the interest rate curve is well-known for a long date in finance literature. It is based on the use of a duration-convexity approximation essentially pioneered by Fisher-Weil [2]. However the situation is inaccurately formulated such that the obtained result is...