29.11.2012 3:21 [Abstrakt AJ.docx] Summary Investments in real property through funds of collective investment The present diploma thesis focuses on collective investment funds of the kind that may be established under current Czech law, and on their investments into real estate. Real property in general is a popular investment target. However, such investments need not necessarily take a direct form, as there are options for indirect investment available in today's environment - one of which is investing by way of collective investment funds. The particular appeal of this form of investment lies in the numerous advantages which it offers to investors, and which would not be available to them individually; for the potential founders of collective investment funds, the attractiveness of collective investment schemes stems from the tax benefits associated with them. Over the past few years, legislation in the Czech Republic in the area of collective investment, in spite of its relatively short history, has been developing briskly, and it is interesting to observe how Czech laws in this field are still in flux. The primary objective of the present thesis is to describe and evaluate the various options for real estate investments by way of Czech collective investment funds. It is divided into eight separate...

Ph.D. / This thesis investigates the persistence of hedge fund managers’ skills, the optimality of strategies they use to outperform consistently the market during periods of boom and/or recession, and the market risk encountered thereby. We consider a data set of monthly investment strategy indices published by Hedge Fund Research group. The data set spans from January 1995 to June 2010. We divide this sample period into four overlapping sub- sample periods that contain different economic market trends. We define a skilled manager as a manager who can outperform the market consistently during two consecutive sub-sample periods. To investigate the presence of managerial skills among hedge fund managers we first distinguish between outperformance, selectivity and market timing skills. We thereafter employ three different econometric models: frequentist, Bayesian and fuzzy regression, in order to estimate outperformance, selectivity and market timing skills using both linear and quadratic CAPM. Persistence in performance is carried out in three different fashions: contingence table, chi-square test and cross-sectional auto-regression technique. The results obtained with the first two probabilistic methods (frequentist and Bayesian) show that fund managers have skills to outperform the market during the period of positive economic growth (i.e. between sub-sample period 1 and sub-sample period 3). This market outperformance is due to both selectivity skill (during sub-sample period 2 and sub-sample period 3), and market timing skill (during sub-sample period 1 and sub- sample period 2). These results contradict the EMH and suggest that the “market is not always efficient,” it is possible to make abnormal rate of returns.However, the results obtained with the uncertainty fuzzy credibility method show that dispite the presence of few fund managers who possess selectivity skills during bull market period (sub-sample period 2 and sub-sample period 3), and market timing skills during recovery period (sub-sample period 3 and sub-sample period 4); there is no evidence of overall market outperformance during the entire sample period. Therefore the fuzzy credibility results support the appeal of the EMH according to which no economic agent can make risk-adjusted abnormal rate of return. The difference in findings obtained with the probabilistic method (frequentist and Bayesian) and uncertainty method (fuzzy credibility theory) is primarily due to the way uncertainty is modelled in the hedge fund universe in particular and in financial markets in general. Probability differs fundamentally from uncertainty: probability assumes that the total number of states of economy is known, whereas uncertainty assumes that the total number of states of economy is unknown. Furthermore, probabilistic methods rely on the assumption that asset returns are normally distributed and that transaction costs are negligible.

The first essay of this dissertation investigates the relationship between downside risk and returns of real estate investment trusts (REITs) and assesses the performance of real estate mutual funds (REMFs). We measure the asymmetric risk through downside and upside betas and through the measures incorporated higher moments such as coskewness and Leland's beta. We do not find significant contemporary relationship between the asymmetric risk and returns of REITs. There are only a small portion of REITs reacting to up and down market conditions differently. We find weak evidence that this asymmetric movement of REITs to market may be due to small and value components embedded in REITs. We evaluate the performance of real estate mutual funds (REMFs) from the asymmetric risk perception. According to our results, most of REMFs do not outperform the market. The downside risk helps to explain some of the abnormal returns associated with REMFs. However, the evaluation may be sensitive to the choices of the model and the market index being used. The second essay examines the liquidity of Asian REITs. We use various measures to assess the liquidity of JREITs and SREITs. The overall evidence indicates that the liquidity of JREITs is greater than that of SREITs. Comparing to non-REIT stocks, JREITs are less liquid than Japanese common stocks while there is no significant difference in liquidity between SREITs and Singaporean common stocks. There is also strong evidence that US REITs have smaller spreads and are traded more often than both JREITs and SREITs. We also find that the primary determinants of JREIT spreads are turnover and return volatility. The secondary factors that affect the spread of JREITs are life and property holdings. The dominant factors affecting SREITs' spreads are price, return volatility, and life. The significance of life suggests that there is a learning effect existed in both JREIT and SREIT markets in 2005.

ABSTRACT South Africa has a sophisticated and developed retirement fund industry and an extensive social security system. While the objective of the latter is wider, both are concerned with financial security: particularly in the face of risks of death, disability and old age. It is widely recognised that there are many gaps in coverage. The chapters in this thesis address these gaps and administrative and benefit structures that could be developed to provide a truly comprehensive social security system. In particular, the thesis discusses the retirement and old age recommendations of the Taylor Committee, on which the author served. The vision is of universal coverage for the current state benefits augmented by mandatory employer based group schemes that offer disability, retirement and orphans' pensions. Means tests, the Road Accident Fund and workers' compensation arrangements would be abolished. The chapters of the thesis are each self-contained, having all been published in – or submitted to – journals, books or conferences. In each, an attempt has been made to review a broader literature than is normally used to discover the impact of some element of the benefit structure, governance or investment policies of retirement schemes on their members. In this context, it is considered to be particularly appropriate to test policies and governance against the standard of justice

Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management University Of Witwatersrand 07 September 2016 / The purpose of this study is to identify whether the Law of One Price theory holds across bitcoin exchanges in different countries given the uniquely defining characteristics of bitcoin. This was explored using Johansen’s Cointegration to extract the economic relationship between the time series sampled. It was demonstrated in the results that the Law does not always hold, however this was dependent on which bitcoin exchange is being used. Prices across the same bitcoin exchanges were likely to hold because of similar transaction costs and the ease of trading. For the time series where the Law of One price did not hold, the explanatory factors could include the bitcoin market illiquidity and purposeful disequilibrium. Bitcoin is a fairly new concept and has been press-worthy in the finance, economic and technological spheres. In South Africa, awareness of the digital currency is low, as is an understanding of its features and the impact on the economy as well as society as a whole. This study therefore aims to explore bitcoin in a finance context, in terms of the Law of One Price, while briefly gaining an understanding of the digital currency itself. / MT2017

Thesis (M.M. (Finance & Investment)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits Business School, 2017 / The world has and is still witnessing a tremendous growth in various categories of mutual funds. Active fund managers continue to grow globally with many asking for exorbitant fees for their research and investment services. Equally, passive funds in the form of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF's) and index trackers have also continued to grow. This massive growth does not preclude funds domiciled in South Africa. Passive investments have grown by about 51 percent a year in the last 10 years in South Africa. As at 2016, there are over 3000 mutual funds domiciled in South Africa. Amidst these growing funds is the ongoing debate relating to the question of which fund management style yields the best outcome. The global debate relating to passive versus active fund management has raged for decades with no clear winner. The extant literature provides mixed evidence on the competitive advantage to either investment strategies. Surprisingly, the evidence for South Africa remains scanty, with a handful of authors addressing the issue. This study therefore, sets out to examine the comparative performance of all equity-only active mutual and passive funds domiciled in South Africa. In addition, it analyses the performance persistence of active and passive funds in different business cycles. A major contribution of this study is that it examines, for the first time, the applicability of the Fama-French five factor model on South African mutual funds. It also employs a battery of econometric methods to address the issue at hand. Relying on data from 2003 to 2016, the study presents evidence that both active and passively managed mutual funds do not earn abnormal returns but rather underperform the benchmark. However, the active portfolio performs relatively better than the passive portfolio, although both underperform the market. The study also documents evidence of time-varying performance; both active and passive funds record their worst underperformance during periods of financial crisis. The study also shows that passive portfolios tend to track the market performance more than active portfolios and that both fund categories tend to be sensitive to global market movements, suggesting that global factors matter for the riskiness of these funds. Finally, it is shown that in terms of driving factors, both active and passive fund managers generally give more preference to small cap returns than large cap returns. In addition, they are more growth oriented, as indicated by the negative coefficients for the HML factor. / MT2017

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.

Thesis advisor: Thomas Chemmanur / My dissertation is comprised of three chapters. In this first chapter, I study the effect of social connections on mutual fund investors' information production and accuracy of their signals. While connected investors have access to information in their social network (information diffusion effect), social connections also reduce their incentives to acquire costly information, since they can free ride on connected peers ("free riding on friends" effect). I find this negative "free riding on friends" effect of social connections dominates information diffusion effect in the mutual fund industry, using fund managers' connections built upon their prior career experiences. First, I find that connected funds are more likely to hold the same stocks and to trade in the same direction, relative to unconnected funds. Second, I find that funds with lower network centrality earn higher alphas, even after controlling for other fund and manager characteristics. A one-standard-deviation increase in eigenvector centrality predicts a decrease of 29-37 basis points in annualized fund alphas. Third, when I define a stock-level variable PMC (Peripheral minus Central) as the difference in average portfolio weights between peripheral funds and central funds, I find that stocks with higher PMC have significantly higher abnormal stock returns. A one-standard-deviation increase in PMC predicts an increase of 1.48%-1.52% in the next quarter risk-adjusted returns (annualized). Finally, I find that PMC predicts firms' future earnings surprises. In the second chapter, co-authored with Thomas Chemmanur, Yingzhen Li, and Jie Xie, we propose a "noisy signaling" hypotheses of open market share repurchase (OMSR) programs, where the equity market equilibrium that prevails after OMSR program announcements is a partial pooling rather than a fully separating equilibrium. We argue that two complementary mechanisms, namely, actual share repurchases by firms and information production by institutions, serve to reduce the residual equity market information asymmetry facing firms subsequent to OMSR program announcements. We test the implications of this noisy signaling hypothesis using transaction-level data on trading by institutions and by a subsample of identified hedge funds, and find strong support for the above hypothesis. In the third chapter, co-authored with Thomas Chemmanur, and Jiekun Huang, we analyze how the geographical locations of institutions affect their investments in IPOs and various characteristics of the IPOs that they invest in. We argue that institutions geographically close to each other may free-ride on each other's information when evaluating IPOs, resulting in IPOs dominated by geographically clustered institutions reflecting less accurate information signals compared to those dominated by geographically dispersed institutions. We find that the equity holdings of institutions in IPOs are influenced more by the investments made by neighboring institutions. We show that an increase in the geographical dispersion of the institutions investing in an IPO is associated with higher IPO price revisions, higher firm valuations at offering and secondary market, larger IPO initial returns, greater long-run post-IPO stock returns lower information asymmetry facing an IPO firm in the equity market. Finally, the predictive power of institutional trading post-IPO for subsequent long-run stock returns and earnings surprises for the first fiscal-year end after the IPO is greater for geographically isolated institutions compared to those that are geographically clustered. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar a performance da indústria de fundos de investimentos em ações no Brasil. Alvo de poucos estudos no mercado nacional, a análise do desempenho da gestão de carteiras se faz cada vez mais importante, dado o avanço, ao longo dos últimos anos, dos fundos de investimentos como destino da poupança privada brasileira. As análises tradicionais, em que é testada individualmente a significância do alfa (intercepto) de regressões dos retornos dos fundos utilizando-se geralmente o CAPM ou o modelo de Fama-French (ou alguma variante destes), sofrem de diversos problemas, como a provável não-normalidade dos erros (73,8% em nossa amostra), e a não-consideração da correlação entre os alfas dos diversos fundos invalidando-se inferências tradicionais. O maior problema desta abordagem, porém, é que se ignora o fato de que, dentro de um universo grande de fundos, espera-se que alguns destes apresentem desempenho superior não por uma gestão diferenciada de suas carteiras, mas por mera sorte. A fim de superar esta dificuldade, o presente estudo, utilizando uma amostra de 812 fundos de ações durante o período 2002-2009 (incluindo-se fundos sobreviventes e não-sobreviventes), simulou a distribuição cross-sectional dos alfas (e de suas respectivas estatística-t) destes fundos através de técnicas de bootstrap, buscando-se com este procedimento eliminar o fator sorte nas análises. Os resultados foram de acordo com a literatura internacional, apresentando evidências da existência de pouquíssimos fundos com performance superior de fato, ao passo que um grande número de fundos apresentou um desempenho negativo, não por azar, mas por real gestão inferior. / The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the performance of the equity mutual funds industry in Brazil. Object of few studies in the national market, the performance analysis of active management has become increasingly more important, given the advance, especially over the last few years, of mutual funds as a destination of the Brazilian private savings. The traditional analysis, where the significance of the alpha (the intercept) from regressions of funds returns is tested individually, using generally the CAPM or the Fama-French model (or some variant of these), suffer from a large array of problems, from the non-normality of errors (73.8% in our sample) to the non-consideration of the correlation between the alphas of the various funds, invalidating the traditional inferences. The biggest problem regarding this approach, however, is that it ignores the fact that, in a large universe of funds, its expected that some funds will present superior performance not from differentiated management, but for mere luck. In order to address these shortcomings, the present study, using an extensive sample of 812 equity mutual funds during the 2002-2009 period (both surviving and non-surviving funds), simulates the cross-sectional distribution of alphas (and its-statistics) through bootstrap techniques, aiming with this procedure to eliminate the luck factor in the analysis. The results were in accordance with the international literature, showing evidences that only a few funds present actual superior performance, and a large number of funds present actual negative performance, not because they were unlucky, but due to inferior management.

Este trabalho analisa o desempenho de fundos de investimento multimercados no mercado brasileiro, para o período de 2005 a 2010. Ele abrange as subcategorias definidas pela ANBIMA: Long and Short - Neutro, Long and Short - Direcional, Macro, Trading, Multiestratégia, Multigestor, Juros e Moedas, Estratégia Específica, Balanceados e Capital Protegido. O objetivo principal é estabelecer uma classificação de desempenho para cada uma destas dez subcategorias, utilizando-se como medida os seguintes índices: Treynor, Sharpe, Jensen, Modigliani, medida de desempenho específica para investidores e a medida de desempenho de mercado ajustado ao risco. O trabalho permite, ainda, analisar o prêmio por seletividade líquida dos fundos e a capacidade de market timing que são mensurados pela medida proposta por Treynor e Mazuy (1966). Com base nos resultados, é construída uma classificação hierárquica, de forma a salientar os fundos mais relevantes da indústria. Além disso, a pesquisa serve como ferramenta ao público de interesse, para a identificação e escolha das alternativas de investimento e das instituições gestoras de fundos multimercados. A amostra compreendeu os fundos multimercados de investimento abertos, não exclusivos e existentes no período entre 1° de janeiro de 2005 e 31 de dezembro de 2010. Os resultados indicam que, no período estudado, a maior parte dos administradores destes fundos foi capaz de bater o índice Bovespa, os quais fizeram com que a representatividade na indústria fosse ampliada. No período analisado, estes fundos enfrentaram satisfatoriamente a crise econômica mundial no ano de 2008 e a crise da dívida pública da Zona Euro de 2010, como consequência, os multimercados mostraram a robustez dos fundos no Brasil. No entanto, eles não apresentaram habilidades de timing nem de seletividade. / The general goal of this work is to analyze the performance of hedge funds investment in the Brazilian market for the period from 2005 to 2010. The subcategories of the hedge funds defined by ANBIMA (Brazilian Association of Financial and Capital) are covered according to ANBIMA (2004) norm updated by Resolution No. 44 (November, 24, 2010). These subcategories are: Long and Short - Neutral, Long and Short - Directional, Macro, Trading, Multistrategy, Multigestor, Interest and Currency, Specific Strategy, Balanced and Capital Protected. In this context, the main objective is to establish a performance rating for each of these ten subcategories through the following indexes measured: Treynor (1965), Sharpe (1966), Jensen (1968), Modigliani (1997), specific performance measure for investors (2004) and the performance measure of market risk-adjusted (2005). The work also allows analyzing the selectivity premium for liquid funds and the ability to market timing what are measured by the measure proposed by Treynor and Mazuy (1966). A hierarchical classification will be constructed based on the results of different measurements, in order to estimate the contribution of the more relevant industry funds. In addition, this research can be used by specific public as a tool to identify and choose the best alternative investment managers and institutional hedge funds. The sample comprises hedge funds investment divided into ten subcategories determined by ANBIMA (2010), referring to hedge funds open, non-exclusive and available in the period from 1 January 2005 to 31 December, 2010 in Brazil. The results indicate that, during the study period, most of the managers of these funds was able to overcome Bovespa index, verifying its importance in the industry through its stability in the face of global economic crisis in 2008 and public debt crisis of Euro zone since 2010, achieving reasonable returns with acceptable risk and good growth in their net equity. However, they do not have timing or selectivity skills.