Fund investments are very popular in Sweden. However, we have the impression that despite this popularity, the average fund investor in Sweden does not pay much attention to the importance and possible link of fund’s asset composition features (e.g. Asset class, Holdings, and Geo-exposure) to fund’s performance. Instead, S/he relies on factors such as fees, risk levels, historical performance, etc. in her/his investment decisions. Similarly, academic studies mainly focus on attributes such as funds fees, size, and manager’s skill to explain fund’s performance. Thus there are limited premier academic studies on the relationship between fund’s performance and its asset composition features. The main purpose of this study is to investigate possible causal relationship between the performances of funds with their assets composition features. We study the whole population of 346 Swedish listed mutual funds older than five years for the period 2009-2013. The results of the study provides the investors and analysts with additional decision-making and investment-analysis tools to assist them in making more informed judgment on funds and their expected returns. The results are also useful for fund managers to improve their strategies by refining the combinations of their funds’ asset composition attributes in order to improve the absolute risk-adjusted performance of their funds. Our research philosophy has been based on positivism and objectivism along with functionalist paradigm and we have applied deductive approach to test the theories. We have used quantitative method and collected the funds’ data from public business databases and chosen Jensen’s alpha and Treynor ratio as funds’ risk-adjusted performance measures. We performed Correlation tests and Regression with robust techniques on our data to answer the research question from three aspects, namely asset class (equity, bond, and mixed assets); geo-exposures (Sweden, Global, Europe, and Nordic) and Top-ten holdings’ measures (asset concentration and Treynor of each fund’s passive top-ten sub-portfolio). We conclude that correlations between funds’ risk-adjusted performance and assets composition features are likely to exist. Stronger correlations are observed between the explanatory measures and fund’s relative risk-adjusted performance (fund’s Treynor) as compared to fund’s absolute risk adjusted performance (fund’s Jensen’s alpha). Asset concentration in top-ten holdings and bond asset class are more likely to be in casual relationship with fund’s risk-adjusted performance, whereas Treynor ratio of top-ten holdings’ passive sub-portfolio as well as fund’s geo-exposure do not seem to have strong explanatory power for funds’ absolute performance.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) is used to protect the Web application (web app). One of the advantages of having WAF is, it can detect possible attacks even if there is no validation implemented on the web app. But how can WAF protect the web app if WAF itself is vulnerable? In general, four testing methods are used to test WAF such as fuzzing, payload execution, bypassing, and footprinting. There are several open-source WAF testing tools but it appears that it only offers one or two testing methods. That means a tester is required to have multiple tools and learn how each tool works to be able to test WAF using all testing methods. This project aims to solve this difficulty by developing a WAF testing tool called ProjectX that offers all testing methods. ProjectX has been tested on a testing environment and the results show that it fulfilled its requirements. Moreover, ProjectX is available on Github for any developer who want to improve or add more functionality to it.

本研究的主要目的是在檢測財務主管相對於審計委員會的影響力，是否會影響到會計師的選擇。本研究以2007至2016間的中國上市公司為樣本，實證結果顯示:（1）財務主管相對於審計委員會的影響力愈大時，公司愈傾向於選擇非十大會計師事務所；（2）財務主管相對影響力於會計師選擇的影響，在國有企業是比較小的，而在私有企業是比較大的。 / The objective of this thesis is to examine whether the relative power of CFOs and audit committees has an effect on its firms’ choice of audit firms. Using a sample of Chinese listed firms during 2007~2016, I find that: (1) companies with more powerful CFOs are more likely to hire lower-quality auditors, as measured by non-top10 audit firm; (2) The effect of CFOs’ relative power on the choice of audit firms is weaker for state-owned enterprises than for private enterprises.