As a consequence of the losses resulting from the speculative activities of the stock trader Jérôme Kerviel of Société Générale, the DAX saw a drop of over 7% on 21 January 2008. This is the date on which the highest daily loss was recorded after issuance of the first endless leverage...

We suggest a joint optimization model for a firm’s hedging and leverage decisions that helps to establish an integrated framework for value creation. Rather than artificially separating the two interrelated parts of the firm’s financial policy, we treat both corporate decision variables as...

This paper develops a theory of a firm’s hedging decision with endogenous leverage. In contrast to previous models in the literature, our framework is based on less restrictive distributional assumptions and allows a closed-form analytical solution to the joint optimization problem. Using...

We investigated the stock price behavior of public pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies upon approval of a drug by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Using event study methodology, we examine the reaction caused by the approval, seperating it from the asset price movements caused by...

A stochastic model is developed to explain how the early unwinding propensity of market participants in financial futures markets can lead to a strong concentration of the trading volume on the nearby contract. In this model the position closing behavior of the market participants is captured by...

Risk capital allocation is based on the assumption that the risk of a homogeneous portfolio is scaled up and down with the portfolio size. In this article we show that this assumption is true for large portfolios, but has to be revised for small ones. On basis of numerical examples we calculate...

While the academic world is still discussing if charting works or if it is more or less something like "Voodoo finance", the practical orientated world has been using technical analysis for decades. One argument of practitioners is, that technical analysis is useful to "disciplinate" the trader...

This paper considers the financial optimization problem of a firm with several sub-businesses striving for its optimal RORAC. An insightful example shows that the implementation of classical gradient capital allocation can be suboptimal if division managers are allowed to venture into all...

This article analyses the initial public offering (IPO) underpricing issue of 237 new A-shares from 2002 to 2004, shortly before the IPO suspension in the Chinese domestic market. The data set comes out with an initial return mean of 88.67%, an average market-adjusted initial return of 89.61%...