The recent financial crisis renewed concerns about a possible destabilizing impact of derivatives trading. Despite a very active research, the question whether or not derivatives tend to destabilize financial markets has not yet been answered to satisfaction. This contribution aims to revise the...

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...

While conventional academic finance emphasizes theories such as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) and the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), the emerging field of behavioral finance investigates the cognitive factors and emotional issues that impact the decision-making process of individuals,...

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...

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 aim of the paper is to verify whether the USD/EUR exchange rate market is efficient. The fundamental parity condition for testing foreign exchange market efficiency is represented by the uncovered interest-rate parity (UIP). Therefore, the UIP hypothesis verification accounts for the crucial...

The purpose of this research is to investigate the weak form of market efficiency of Asian four selected stock markets. We have taken a daily closing price of stock markets under the study from the 1st January 2000 to 31st March 2011 and also divided full sample in three interval periods, and...

This study proposes a process for observing evidence of insider trading in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). This is performed by building an environment which, based upon previous research, common sense and information technology, may be used for observing such evidence. It is designed to be...

In the last days of the electoral campaign for the 2004 general election in Spain, on Thursday March 11th 2004, a series of simultaneous terror attacks caused the death of 191 persons in commuting trains in the capital Madrid. Four days later, the opposition party won the election, against all...

In present study, we contribute to the discussion on international stock market correlations, by analyzing interdependencies between stock returns in US and Israeli stock exchanges. In particular, we concentrate on the original feature of Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) where the trading week...