Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

Funds of Hedge Funds (FHF) are perceived to be the premier choice of institutional investors for first-time allocations into the alternative investment asset class. While many papers cover the bright side of FHF investing, we in this paper empirically investigate the maximum drawdowns of FHF....

This paper argues that special purpose vehicles, SPVs, are two-edged financial constructs whose bad edge consists in conveying opaque governance, whereas its good one amounts to interesting financial engineering. Firstly, the notion of opaque governance is highlighted, to focus next on SPVs and...

Given the growing importance of terrorism in today's world, it is essential to understand its impact on the global economy. This paper examines the case of Israel to consider the impact of this phenomenon on the nation's economy. Specifically, it will aim to determine whether the Israeli...

The exchange rate plays vital role in the financial market and its importance is increasing in the developing economies. Exchange rate volatility is an important factor to consider in decision making by the investors as the interest of global investment community is increasing in assets market...

With the advent in recent years of large financial data sets, machine learning and high-performance computing, analysts can backtest millions (if not billions) of alternative investment strategies. Backtest optimizers search for combinations of parameters that maximize the simulated historical...

Correlation matrices are ubiquitous in finance. Some key applications include portfolio construction, risk management, and factor/style analysis. Correlation matrices are usually estimated from historical empirical observations or derived from historically estimated factors. It is widely...

We prove that high simulated performance is easily achievable after backtesting a relatively small number of alternative strategy configurations, a practice we denote “backtest overfitting”. The higher the number of configurations tried, the greater is the probability that the backtest is...

We examine the relation between venture capital (VC) investments, M&A activity, and merger competition laws in 48 countries around the world. We find evidence of a strong positive association between VC investments and lagged M&A activity, consistent with the hypothesis that an active M&A market...

Most research on the performance and risk of hedge funds are based on calculations that just use the data from one index provider. Also most product providers and even more and more investors are using hedge fund indices for benchmarking purposes. As some academic articles pointed out, the world...