This thesis aims to examine whether it is possible to forecast which firmswill be shorted. To do this a regression was constructed using a sample of thecompanies currently included in S&P 500. Short interest as percentage offloat was set as the dependent variable with volatility, institutionalownership, past stock returns, growth in net sales and price-to-earnings ratio(P/E) as the independent variables. Our results concluded that all variablesexcept institutional ownership were statistically significant at a 5% level withthree of these being significant even at a 1% level. Based on these results, webelieve that it to a certain degree is possible to forecast which firms will beshorted.

If more people are starting to invest, then the focus on the effective markethypothesis will increase. The hypothesis's basic idea is that stock pricesalready reflect all available information and outperforming the marketthrough investment strategies is not possible. This study presents how twoinvestment strategies, CAN SLIM and Peter Lynch, has performed on andagainst the S&P 500 under a 10 year period. The result of the study showsthat the efficient market hypothesis does not hold and that an excess returncompared to the market is possible. Between the investment strategies therewas a comparison and analysis regarding the Sharpe ratio and the CapitalAsset Pricing Model. Conclusively, the study shows that CAN SLIM is thestrategy that has performed the best under the period that the study is basedon.

Magister Commercii - MCom / Diversification is one of the more familiar concepts in finance because of its ability to curtail risk towards investors. However, for diversification to be efficient, the assets combined should have inversely related price movements. In the same light, previous research done on international portfolio diversification has consistently found that having investments diversified across different global markets that have low to medium correlations helps to get as close to an optimal portfolio as possible. However, previous research also indicates that both global financial integration and exogenous shocks increase correlations among international markets, hence negating the benefits of international portfolio diversification to an extent. Therefore, with global integration on the rise, coupled with economic and political instability in some BRICS nations, the research examines these factors and gauges the current viability of international portfolio diversification from the perspective of a South African investor.

A rational long-horizon stock investment decision is a complex process due to uncertainty in supply and demand, competitive advantage, macroeconomic parameters and various perspectives of investors. Today, the '€˜non-tangible assets'€™ (NTA) that include goodwill and intangible assets are a significant part of corporate assets, but their role in stock performance has not well studied. The purpose of this research is to empirically analyze the implications of NTA and of gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States on the stock price. According to the efficient market hypothesis, stock price reflects all relevant information. The research question focused on the extent to which NTA and the GDP reflected in the stock price. To determine the extent to which NTA and GDP reflected on the stock price, regression analysis and other statistical tests were used. The sample for the empirical study was 56 corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ). The required data from October 2007 to September 2018 were collected from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the United States Bureau of Economics (BEA). The key findings of the study are: the NTA and stock price of 45 corporations have a statistically significant correlation as opposed to 11 corporations. The combined NTA of these 11 corporations for the third quarter of 2018 was $531.64 billion. Furthermore, the GDP and stock price of 53 corporations have a statistically significant correlation, but no evidence for three corporations was found. The significance for positive social change is knowledge from this research about the implications of NTA and GDP on stock performance that the investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders could use for preserving the limited resources and creating wealth.

Kreditvärderingsinstituten marknadsför sig som oberoende aktörer som ska vägleda investerare att övervinna informationsasymmetrier på kapitalmarknaden. Kreditvärderingsinstituten har på det sättet skaffat sig en framträdande roll på kapitalmarknaden. Kreditvärderingsinstituten ger en förenklad spegling av verkligheten samtidigt som de besitter en stor makt. Kommersiella fastighetsbolag kan förbättra sin kreditvärdighet om de överensstämmer med kreditvärderingsinstitutets normer. Analysen använder sig av en Foucaultinspirerade maktanalys för att beskriva hur maktrelationen ser ut och vilka effekter den får.  Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur de kommersiella fastighetsbolag som tagit upp ett officiellt kreditbetyg har påverkats av kreditvärderingsinstitutets normer och vilka inverkningar det har haft på organisationen. På så sätt kan det ge en ökad förståelse för hur yttre påtryckningar kan normaliseras och leda till ett självreglerande beteende inom en organisation.   Studien har antagit en kvalitativ forskningsstrategi med ett abduktivt arbetssätt. Den befintliga forskningen har varit vägledande i studien men inte styrande utan studien har löpande stämt av observationerna mot den. Studiens primärdata har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer av fyra finanschefer och en medarbetare på finansavdelningen på fem kommersiella fastighetsbolag i Sverige. Därigenom utforskas huruvida kreditvärderingsinstitutets normer och metodologi har internaliserats och bidragit till organisatoriska förändringar.  Resultatet visade att kreditvärderingsinstitutets normer i form av deras metodologi för kreditvärdighet hade införts av organisationerna i varierad utsträckning. / The credit rating agencies market themselves as independent actors who should guide investors to overcome information asymmetries in the capital market. In this way, the credit rating agencies have acquired a prominent role in the capital market. The credit rating agencies provide a simplified reflection of reality while exercising power. Commercial real estate companies can improve their credit rating if they comply with the credit rating agency's standards. The analysis uses a Foucault-inspired power analysis to try to describe what the power relationship looks like and what effects it has. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the commercial real estate companies that have taken up an official credit rating experience the credit rating agency's standards and how it affects the organization. In this way, it can provide an increased understanding of how external pressures can be normalized and transformed into self-regulating behavior within an organization. The study has adopted a qualitative research strategy with an abductive approach. The existing research has been guiding in the study but not governing, but the study has continuously adjusted the observations against it. The study's primary data has been collected through semi-structured interviews of four finance managers and one employee in the finance department at five commercial real estate companies in Sweden. In doing so, it is explored whether the credit rating agency's standards and methodology have been internalized and contributed to organizational changes. The result showed that the credit rating institute's standards in the form of their methodology for creditworthiness had been introduced by the organizations to a varying extent.

Special Purpose acquisition company (SPAC) är ett skalbolag grundat av investerare med det enda syftet att samla kapital genom en börsintroduktion för att senare förvärva ett annat bolag. Tidigare empirisk forskning för SPAC har fokuserat på egenskaperna hos SPAC bolagen samt deras långsiktiga och kortsiktiga avkastning. Denna studie tar en kvantitativ ansats och syftar till att undersöka vilka underliggande makroekonomiska faktorer har bidragit till en ökning i antalet SPAC bolag. Detta undersöks genom en linjär regressionsanalys där studien undersöker korrelationen mellan olika variabler. Studien syftar även till att se om de underliggande makroekonomiska faktorer bakom ökningen av traditionella börsintroduktioner är detsamma som de bakom SPAC. All data för SPAC, makroekonomiska variabler och börsintroduktioner har samlats in genom olika databaser som Yahoo Finance och Nasdaq. Studiens resultat visar på att vissa makroekonomiska variabler som testats för en korrelation har en påverkan på antalet SPAC och börsintroduktioner medans vissa variabler inte bevisade någon påverkan. Variabeln som visade starkast korrelation med antalet SPAC är den generella marknadens avkastning där det är tydligt att om den generella marknaden är stark så är viljan att göra en börsnotering större Studien fann även att de makroekonomiska variabler bakom ökningen av antalet SPAC och vanliga börsnoteringar inte skiljer sig åt. / This paper is written in Swedish. A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is a shell company set up by investors with the sole purpose of raising money through an IPO to eventually acquire another company. Past empirical research on Special purpose acquisition companies has mostly focused on the characteristics of the SPACs and long term returns as well as the short term returns. This study takes a quantitative approach and aims to examine whether underlying macroeconomic factors have contributed to the increase in SPAC companies. This is done by a linear regression analysis that tests for correlations between different variables. The study also aims to see if the underlying macroeconomic factors behind the increase of traditional IPOs are the same as those behind SPACs. All data regarding SPACs, IPOs and the macroeconomic factors were collected from different databases and websites such as Yahoo finance and NASDAQ. The results from this study show that some of the macroeconomic factors which were tested for a correlation indeed have a positive impact on the number of SPACs and IPOs and some did not. The variable that showed the strongest correlation was the performance of the general market and it is clear that when the general market is strong the willingness to go public increases. The study also finds that the macroeconomic variables behind the increase in the number of SPACs and IPOs do not differ.

This thesis studies bubbles in the U.S. stock market and how they are influenced by monetary policy pursued by the FED. Using Kalman filtering, the log-real price of S&P 500 is decomposed into a market-fundamentals component and a bubble component. The market-fundamentals component depends on the expected future dividends and the required rate of return, while the bubble component is treated as an unobserved state vector in the state-space model. The results suggest that, mainly in recent decades, the bubble has accounted for a substantial portion of S&P 500 price dynamics and might have played a significant role during major bull and bear markets. The innovation of this thesis is that it goes one step further and investigates the effects of monetary policy on both estimated components of S&P 500. For this purpose, the block- restriction VAR model is employed. The findings indicate that the decreasing interest rates have a significant short-term positive effect on the market-fundamentals component but not on the bubble. On the other hand, quantitative easing seems to have a positive effect on the bubble but not on the market-fundamentals component. Finally, the results suggest that the FED has not been successful at distinguishing between stock price movements due to fundamentals or the price misalignment.

Paper [I] tests the success rate of trades and the returns of the Opening Range Breakout (ORB) strategy. A trader that trades on the ORB strategy seeks to identify large intraday price movements and trades only when the price moves beyond some predetermined threshold. We present an ORB strategy based on normally distributed returns to identify such days and find that our ORB trading strategy result in significantly higher returns than zero as well as an increased success rate in relation to a fair game. The characteristics of such an approach over conventional statistical tests is that it involves the joint distribution of low, high, open and close over a given time horizon. Paper [II] measures the returns of a popular day trading strategy, the Opening Range Breakout strategy (ORB), across volatility states. We calculate the average daily returns of the ORB strategy for each volatility state of the underlying asset when applied on long time series of crude oil and S&P 500 futures contracts. We find an average difference in returns between the highest and the lowest volatility state of around 200 basis points per day for crude oil, and of around 150 basis points per day for the S&P 500. This finding suggests that the success in day trading can depend to a large extent on the volatility of the underlying asset. Paper [III] performs empirical analysis on short-term and long-term Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) strategies regarding their exposures to unanticipated risk shocks. Previous research documents that CTA strategies offer diversification opportunities during equity market crisis situations when evaluated as a group, but do not separate between short-term and long-term CTA strategies. When separating between short-term and long-term CTA strategies, this paper finds that only short-term CTA strategies provide a significant, and consistent, exposure to unanticipated risk shocks while long-term CTA strategies do not. For the purpose of diversifying a portfolio during equity market crisis situations, this result suggests that an investor should allocate to short-term CTA strategies rather than to long-term CTA strategies.

Diploma thesis deals with analyzing the possibility of using artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic, on the capital markets as a tool to support decision making in business. The Matlab software is used for this purpose. The work is divided into three parts. The first part deals with theoretical knowledge, brief description of the current situationin is covered in a second part and the theoretical solutions are applied to the system in the third section.

This diploma thesis describes issues of use of means of artificial intelligence for the decision making support on stock market. It includes theoretical knowledge of technical, fundamental and psychological analysis and artificial intelligence. Based on these facts have been created specific suggestions for the use of artificial neural networks to forecast the future value of the index S&P 500 by using development environment of the MATLAB software.