The aim of the Master Thesis is to find the suitable product for investing in capital markets for small investors. Partial aim is to fully and clearly describe the very principle of functioning of capital markets in a clear and understandable way. The aim is also analysis of selected investment instrument, evaluation of the risk and impact assessment of possible loss of funds to the investor, which has to be take into consideration in each investment. Since the thesis is about investing in the capital markets, the risk of loosing of the invested funds is relatively high. This thesis also characterizes the way in which this risk can be eliminated as much as possible to achieve the desired return on investment.

This thesis is focused on financial analysis of Accor hotel group. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and assess the financial position, financial health and performance of the company from the above-mentioned two perspectives, furthermore the monitoring of the development of the financial analysis and the analysis of changes during the period, also a comparison of selected indicators with industry and sector averages and lastly, a deepening of knowledge in the field of financial analysis. The aim of the work or the working hypothesis is to determine whether the selected company is prospective to the investor and sufficiently creditworthy for the bank or in general whether the company has passable financial position and performance. In order to achieve these objectives and purposes was chosen as the method of financial analysis. Other used methods are observation and comparison. These methods include, for example, financial techniques like horizontal and vertical analysis, ratio analysis, as well as simple mathematical tools like averages and percentages and lastly accounting tools like ratios and trend analysis. The thesis is divided into two parts. First part deals with the theoretical definition of concept of financial analysis which is followed by related terms and second part dealt with the presentation of given company, application of theory in practice, summary and recommendation.

Portfolio diversification is a procedure by which investor allocates and divides his or her funds into different type of securities. Unlike the investing all the funds solely into one security, diversification enables to reduce the risk of an investment by splitting one big risk into several small, unrelated risks. This master thesis examines the problem of diversification during a financial crisis, when usually the risk of an investment and uncertainty of future incomes from investment is relatively higher. The main goal of this thesis is to define whether is it more efficient and beneficial to diversify the portfolio solely from national securities or conversely to diversify internationally. In the theoretical part, it offers literature background on topics related to capital market, fundamentals of portfolio and fundamental analysis. In the empirical part it examines the risk and return of three national portfolios on monthly basis during a 10-year investment period, which is separated into three individual periods, in order to better observe the impacts of crisis. In order to fulfill the main goal of the thesis, composite international portfolio was constructed and observed on the same manner as the three national portfolios. Afterwards the outcomes were compared and conclusions were stated. Internationally diversified portfolio has not achieved remarkably better result than individual national portfolios. Therefore, it may be concluded that there is no strong need for an investor to diversify his or her portfolio internationally, as it does not show better results as nationally diversified portfolios.

The present thesis focuses on founding and evolution of information technology startups. Special attention is given to the personality of the founder and the options of financing a startup in the Czech Republic. A survey among the students of the University of Economics, Prague regarding the general awareness of the issues related to the founding of a startup and the main obstacles to it is an integral part of the thesis. The main contribution of the thesis is a method for building up the IT startups, which may serve as a hand-book for potential future founders. As a secondary contribution, this thesis serves as a compact overview of the issues related to startups, especially to the person of the founder and financing possibilities in the Czech Republic.

Master thesis is about entrepreneurship. The theoretical part provides basic theoretical concepts related to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. This section describes the entrepreneurial skills, entrepreneurial personality traits and three alternative structures of the business plan. Practical work has a real benefit for the author, because it is the business plan for the authors real business idea. A substantial part of this part consists of marketing research, which is used to verify authors hypothesis and define the size of the market. The aim is to assess the feasibility of a specific business plan.

This dissertation investigates why a substantial number of common stocks is held by companies in many countries, especially in Japan. Chapter 1 gives an overview of historical and legal issues regarding corporate shareholding in Japan. Chapter 2 reviews how researchers have, theoretically and empirically, approached corporate shareholding issues. Chapter 3 elaborates on a corporate shareholding model which incorporates a standard principal-agent model with Aoki's managerial risk sharing argument (Aoki, 1988). The model finds that a risk-averse manager of a firm invests in other firms if managerial reward is linked with the value of the firm she manages, and if the operating profits of investing and invested firms are negatively correlated. Corporate stock investment is larger if the invested (and/or investing) company's operating profit is less volatile and/or if the covariance in the operating profits of the companies is more strongly negative. Although a stronger link between corporate performance and managerial reward increases managers' incentive to exert efforts, it also increases the risk that managers must bear. If the risk is too high, managers would leave their companies. Corporate stock investment reduces the risk, and enables shareholders to offer a higher incentive to the managers and to earn a higher (expected) income. Chapter 4 examines three major arguments concerning the rationale behind the practice of corporate shareholding: the competitive-effect, risk-sharing, and control-rights arguments. Predictions drawn from those arguments are tested using panel data of 186 Japanese corporate group firms from 1980 to 1988. The main findings of this study are as follows. (1) The competitive-effect argument is clearly supported by the data. Firms in the same industry do tend to invest more in one another. (2) The evidence in favor of the risksharing argument is weaker — although firms with less risky operating profits tend to attract more investment, the relationship between investment and the covariance in the firms' operating profits is ambiguous. (3) The strongest empirical support is given to the control-rights argument. Indeed, the evidence confirms that a firm is more likely to invest in other firms that hold more of its own shares. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

The aim of this thesis is to explore investment opportunities of the Czech population, the ability of businesses to obtain needed capital for their investment plans and possibilities to obtain these funds from individuals through securities. The main part of this work is to evaluate the dependence between the securities markets and the growth of gross domestic product between 2006 - 2012. For the research, graphical and correlation analysis were used. Due to detected dependencies between gross domestic product and the bond market, issuance of bonds with a five-month delay of the positive fluctuation of gross domestic product was recommended. The final section is concentrates on prediction of the future development of the bond market, which proved to be unpredictable.

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors' sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure, any decision made for the same asset within the same time horizon will be different for different individuals. In other words, there will neither be homogeneity of beliefs nor the rational expectation prevalent in the market due to behavioral traits. This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, Investor Sentiment and Intrinsic Stock Prices, a new technical trading strategy is developed using a firm specific individual sentiment measure. This behavioral based trading strategy forecasts a range within which a stock price moves in a particular period and can be used for stock trading. Results show that sample firms trade within a range and show signals as to when to buy or sell. The second essay, Managerial Sentiment and the Value of the Firm, examines the effect of managerial sentiment on the project selection process using net present value criterion and also effect of managerial sentiment on the value of firm. Findings show that high sentiment and low sentiment managers obtain different values for the same firm before and after the acceptance of a project. The last essay, Investor Sentiment and Optimal Portfolio Selection, analyzes how the investor sentiment affects the nature and composition of the optimal portfolio as well as the performance measures. Results suggest that the choice of the investor sentiment completely changes the portfolio composition, i.e., the high sentiment investor will have a completely different choice of assets in the portfolio in comparison with the low sentiment investor. The results indicate the practical application of behavioral model based technical indicators for stock trading. Additional insights developed include the valuation of firms with a behavioral component and the importance of distinguishing portfolio performance based on sentiment factors.

Investors herd when they follow the investment decisions of other market participants and ignore their own private information, causing asset valuations to deviate from their fundamentals. This paper examines herding in the South African equity market by examining the impact of investor fear on herding behavior, using a survivorship-bias free daily dataset of companies within the JSE All Share Index over the period: 3 May 2002 to 31 December 2019. Using the cross-sectional absolute deviation (CSAD), this study examines market-wide herding behavior over multiple sub-periods, which consists of before, during and after the global financial crisis of 2007/08. The results suggest no evidence of herding towards the market return; on the contrary there is evidence of ‘anti-herding' behaviour during periods of market stress. However, there is significant herding towards the domestic fear index, which becomes more pronounced during the crisis period. Furthermore, investor herd behaviour appears to be sensitive to spill-over effects from the US investor fear-gauge, suggesting interconnectedness with global financial markets. Therefore, these findings suggest that fear plays an important role in enforcing irrational behaviour.

This thesis deals with the design of extending the ICT infrastructure in Aumeto s.r.o. There are theoretical points, techniques and methods that are used later. The analysis of current data network in Aumeto s.r.o. was the goal of the first part. Designed part is based on that analysis.