Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Finance and Investments in the FACULTY OF COMMERCE, LAW AND MANAGEMENT WITS BUSINESS SCHOOL at the UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND / The South African hedge fund industry is reported to have had R52 billion (USD 4.8 billion) assets under management at the end of December 2013. This compares to the global industry which is reported to have surpassed USD 2.6 trillion at the end of 2013. Due to the relative infancy of the local industry, little research exists to analyse the performance of South African hedge fund strategies. This study focuses on the performance of South African hedge fund strategies under different market regimes, taking into consideration market and economic factors specific to South Africa. The analysis shows that the hedge fund strategies offer a diversification benefit to more traditional asset classes, and the results of the study can be used to inform an investor’s allocation decision. The findings of the analysis are used as the basis of a portfolio construction framework for constructing a portfolio of hedge funds. The framework is predicated on the investor having a view on the forthcoming macro environment. The framework enables the investor to identify funds and strategies that have produced a stable alpha over a similar market regime for inclusion in the portfolio of funds. After identifying those funds and strategies most suited to the anticipated macro environment, the number of funds to be included in the portfolio is taken under consideration to determine the optimal number such that the performance and risk characteristics of the portfolio are not compromised. The analysis takes the higher moments of the distribution into account to cater for the non-normal nature of hedge fund distributions.

This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Finance and Investment. Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management 2017 / The vicious quest for higher risk-adjusted returns through diversification of portfolios has seen an enormous amount of foreign capital flows into new emerging markets. However, the success of any strategy profoundly depends on the degrees of comovements among markets - higher comovements limit the possible gains from diversification. It has been argued that the very act of chasing after these diversification benefits, which mainly includes financial globalisation, has actually resulted in the erosion of the benefits themselves. In addition, aspects such as international trade, the establishment of trade blocs and liberalisation of market controls has further reduced these diversification benefits. In this study, the long-run cointegration, short-run causality and volatility linkages were examined using six COMESA markets indices. The goal of the study was to ascertain whether the establishment of this bloc has resulted in increased association among the member markets. The astonishing rate at which globalisation has been growing at has drawn with it both opportunities and risks for investors. The Engle-Granger, the Johansen cointegration technique and the ARDL test methods revealed that the markets integrated in the long run, a result indicative of low diversification benefits across COMESA markets. However, the weak short-run causality from the causality tests revealed that despite the strong long-run relationship, an active investment strategy that seeks to diversify portfolios in the short-run could still yield enormous diversification benefits. A subsequent examination of the volatility linkages using generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models revealed that uniformity of volatility structures in terms volatility persistence, leverage effects and risk premium across the markets, indicative of the high likelihood of volatility spill-overs across the markets. This implies that, despite the weak short-run causality, the benefits from short-run diversification can still be quite low due to the high likelihood of volatility spillovers across these markets. In light of these results, investors within the COMESA markets should rather focus on other markets outside the COMESA as diversification destinations. / MT2017

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of' Science. / This research report describes the use or the Pearl's algorithm in Bayesian belief networks to induce a belief network from a database. With a solid grounding in probability theory, the Pearl algorithm allows belief updating by propagating likelihoods of leaf nodes (variables) and the prior probabilities. The Pearl algorithm was originally developed for binary variables and a generalization to more states is investigated. The data 'Used to test this new method, in a Portfolio Management context, are the Return and various attributes of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange ( JSE ). The results of this model is then compared to a linear regression model. The bayesian method is found to perform better than a linear regression approach. / Andrew Chakane 2018

This dissertation investigates two fundamental questions related to how well exchange-traded funds that hold portfolios of fixed-income assets (bond ETFs) proxy for their underlying portfolios. The first question involves price/net-asset-value (NAV) mean-reversion asymmetries and the effectiveness of the arbitrage mechanism of bond ETFs. Methodologically, to answer the first question I focus on a time-series analysis. The second question involves the degree to which average returns of bond ETF shares respond to changes in factors that have been found to drive average returns of bond portfolios. To answer this question I shift the focus of the analysis to a cross-section asset pricing test. In other words, do bond ETF share prices track the value of their underlying assets, and are they priced by investors like bonds in the cross-section? The first essay concludes that bond ETF shares exhibit mean-reversion asymmetries when price and NAV diverge, along persistent small premiums. These premiums appear to reflect the added value that bond ETFs bring to the fixed-income asset market through smaller trading increments, greater liquidity, and the ability to buy on margin and sell short. The second essay concludes that market, bond-specific, and firm-specific risk factors can help to explain the variation in U.S. bond ETF average returns, but only size seems to be priced in the cross-section of expected returns. This is not surprising as the sample used in the asset pricing tests is limited to the period 2007-2010, which corresponds to the "great recession", and size has been interpreted in the asset pricing literature as a state variable that proxies for financial distress and is highly dependent on the phase of the real business cycle. / The two essays together suggest that bond ETFs can be used in trading strategies based on taking long and short positions in fixed-income assets, especially when trading in portfolios of fixed-income assets directly is not feasible. / by Charles W. Evans. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

By analyzing the information provided by analyst recommendations in the banking industry, I find that analyst recommendations trigger an immediate impact on the value of banks (Essay 1), they profitably guide the investment decisions of investors for periods of up to three months (Essay 2), and they also have an immediate impact on the values of rival banks (Essay 3). In addition, I find that analysts’ ability to provide new information depends on the information environment of the bank. The degree of information asymmetry, the degree of complexity, the risk of the bank, the risk of the time period, as well as regulatory reforms that affect these characteristics, have a significant impact on the analyst’s ability to provide new information to the investors. Specifically, I find that analyst recommendations are more informative when banks suffer from a high degree of information asymmetry. In addition, regulatory reforms that reduced the information asymmetry of the banking industry also diminished the analyst’s ability to provide new information. Similarly, I find that analyst recommendations have a greater impact on the values of the rated and the rival banks when these banks operate in a risky environment. This result is robust to several measures of bank risk, period risk, and regulatory events that affected the risk of the banking industry. However, the results of Essay 2 show that positive recommendations that occur during riskier periods or after regulatory events that increased the risk of the banking industry result in lower value for the investors over the following 1-month or 3- month periods. Lastly, I find that as banks become more complex, analyst recommendations have a smaller immediate impact on the value of the bank, deliver a smaller investment value for the investors, and also have a smaller immediate impact on the value of the rival banks. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Esta dissertação analisa os benefícios da diversificação internacional, advindos de uma maior abertura a investimentos no exterior, sob a perspectiva dos investidores institucionais brasileiros. Primeiramente, será desenvolvida uma revisão da literatura existente, abordando os benefícios da diversificação internacional, bem como algumas experiências de países que realizaram a internacionalização das carteiras locais e os resultados macroeconômicos advindos destas. Foram examinadas empiricamente as mudanças de posição das fronteiras eficientes para diferentes graus de abertura a investimentos em ações estrangeiras. Como principal análise empírica foram compostas carteiras internacionais eficientes, otimizadas pelo critério de média-variância, considerando o risco cambial. Os resultados indicaram uma redução do risco da carteira doméstica pela alocação em ações estrangeiras. Concluiu-se que o grau em que os benefícios do investimento externo em termos de retorno e diversificação poderiam ser utilizados foi limitado pela regulamentação, em detrimento do desempenho da carteira dos investidores institucionais. Finalmente, uma gradual mas decisiva diminuição das restrições a investimentos no exterior é recomendada. / This work analyzes the international diversification benefits of an increase in the limits for foreign investing from the perspective of Brazilian institutional investors. We examine empirically the efficient frontiers position after portfolio restrictions on overseas investments were progressively eased. As the main empirical analysis, efficient international portfolios were constructed, optimized by the mean-variance model, considering exchange risk. First, we present a literature review of international diversification and discuss the experience of some countries in the process of internationalizing domestic portfolios and its macroeconomic implications. The results indicate a risk reduction of the domestic portfolio by adding international stocks. We conclude that, in Brazil, the degree to which the benefits of foreign investment in terms of returns and diversification may be utilized for portfolio objectives were limited by regulation, to the detriment of performance of institutional investor?s portfolio. Finally, a gradual but decisive loosening of restrictions on foreign investments is recommended.

This thesis describes some of the practical issues faced by a portfolio manager in analyzing the risk associated with a portfolio of assets. The main tools used are the mean-variance optimization algorithm introduced by Markowitz and multi-factor models for risk decomposition. A sample portfolio designed to track the Russell 1000G stock index is constructed that minimizes tracking error while satisfying constraints on the exposure of the portfolio to particular factors (growth and market capitalization).

This thesis describes the Delta-Normal method of computing Value-at-Risk. The advantages and disadvantages of the Delta-Normal method compared to the Historical and Monte Carlo method of computing Value-at-Risk are discussed. The Delta-Normal method of computing Value-at-Risk is compared with the Historical Simulation method of Value-at-Risk using an implementation of portfolio consisting of ten stocks for 400 time intervals. Based on the normality of the distribution of the portfolio risk factors, Delta-Normal would be suitable if the distribution is normal and Historical Simulation method of calculating Value-at-Risk would be ideally suited if the distribution is non-normal.

"No matter how good a portfolio manager is, she or he can not makes right investment decisions without the right information. It is all about data: how can many megabytes of data must be loaded into a continuously growing system, stored efficiently, and made easily accessible to all queries and to all applications? In this project, we build a decision database for managing a portfolio of fixed-income investments. We review the key features of the database architecture and describe key steps in processing the available date. In addition, we review some common analyses that are done by the portfolio manager by studying the report needed for a study of the investment duration at the sector level. "

"The information ratio is a very controversial topic in the business world. Some portfolio managers put a lot of weight behind this risk-analysis measurement while others believe that this financial statistic can be easily manipulated and thus shouldn't be trusted. In this paper, an attempt will be made to show both sides of this issue by defining the information ratio, applying this definition to real world situations, explaining some of the negative impacts on the information ratio, comparing this ratio to other statistical measures, and showing some ways to improve a portfolio manager's information ratio. "