Not available / text

This thesis investigates issues relating to international portfolio diversification from the perspective of the Polish stock market in the context of the financial crisis. Beginning with an outline of the functioning of the Polish stock market, the first contribution of the thesis is to consider the risks, benefits and opportunities in this market. Within this context, trading strategies are considered with an emphasis on the impact on risk reduction or return enhancement of initial public offerings. Second, the thesis provides a model which may be relevant for measuring trend durations in equity prices. A third element of the thesis considers the influence of spill-over effects (from the financial crisis) on equity investments in Poland, incorporating country and industry specific factors. Finally, the thesis considers financial crisis contagion and policies that may be relevant for practitioners.

Not available / text

- / -

This thesis documents a heavy-tailed analysis of stable portfolios. Stock market crashes occur more often than is predicted by a normal distribution,which provides empirical evidence that asset returns are heavy-tailed. The motivation of this thesis is to study the effects of heavy-tailed distributions of asset returns. It is imperative to know the risk that is incurred for unlikely tail events in order to develop a safer and more accurate portfolio. The heavy-tailed distribution that is used to model asset returns is the stable distribution. The problem of optimally allocating assets between normal and stable distribution portfolios is studied. Furthermore, a heavy-tail sensitivity analysis is performed in order to see how the optimal allocation changes as the heavy-tail coefficient is altered. In order to solve both problems, we use a mean-dispersion risk measure and a probability of loss risk measure. Our analysis is done for two-asset stable portfolios, one of the assets being risk-free, and one risky. The approach used involves changing the heavy-tail parameter of the stable distribution and finding the differences in the optimal asset allocation. The key result is that relatively more wealth is allocated to the risk-free asset when using stable distributions than when using normal distributions. The exception occurs when using a loss probability risk measure with a very high risk tolerance. We conclude that portfolios assuming normal distributions incorrectly calculate the risk in two types of situations. These portfolios do not account for the heavy-tail risk when the risk tolerance is low and they do not account for the higher peak around the mean when the risk tolerance is high.

This master‘s final paper formulates problems of the commercial banks‘ credit portfolio risk management. It analyzes theoretical methods to manage credit portfolio risk conducted by various Lithuanian and foreign authors. It also analyses „NORD/LB Lietuva“ bank credit portfolio risk management: principles of credit portolio formation, credit risk management in the process of granting loans, credit portfolio risk management in the process of monitoring, management of default credits and requirements for the credit indemnity. This paper offers ways to impove credit portfolio risk management in the bank. It indicates effective credit risk management organisational structure, effective credit portfolio risk management system and methods to evaluate financial risk and sufficiency of the capital required to cover credit risk.

In contrast to the studies of constant or time-varying correlations between stock and bond returns, in this thesis, I explore the regime-dependent correlations between stock and bond returns. Specifically, I start with a comprehensive asset pricing model, i.e., a regime-switching multifactor model, and then investigate the regime-dependent correlations between stock and bond returns. Based on the BIC, the number of regimes in the regime-switching model is optimally determined to be two. For the two regimes, the directions of the regime-dependent correlations appear to be significantly different. Also, the magnitudes of the regime-dependent correlations are substantially larger in these two regimes than the correlation in the single regime. With my findings in the regime-dependent correlations, I then examine the performance of portfolio strategies. Throughout the in-sample and out-of-sample tests, I find that the two portfolio strategies, regime inferred portfolio and probability implied portfolio, can outperform the benchmark, S&P 500.

Bakalauro baigiamajame darbe buvo formuojamas optimalus NASDAQ OMX Baltic biržoje kotiruojamų akcijų portfelis remiantis Markowitz portfelio sudarymo modeliu. Darbą sudaro teorinė ir praktinė dalis. Teorinėje dalyje analizuojama investicijų samprata, susisteminami vertybiniai popieriai, pateikiama vertybinių popierių teorijos raida, pateikiama rizikos, pelningumo samprata, apibendrinama diversifikacijos ir optimizavimo svarba. Praktinėje dalyje fundamentinės analizės ir AB „Swedbank“ analitikų pateiktų duomenų sintezės pagalba analizuojama Pabaltijo rinka, nustatoma jos ekonominė būklė. Apibendrinant pelningumo rodiklius nustatomi efektyviausiai veiklą vykdantys pramonės sektoriai. Vėliau šių sektorių įmonės analizuojamos taikant fundamentinę analizę įmonės lygiu ir formuojamas optimalus akcijų portfelis įvedant rizikos ir pelningumo sąvokas. / This bachelor thesis is about forming investment portfolio from NASDAQ OMX Baltic stocks using Markowitz portfolio theory. Theses have two main parts theoretical and empirical. In theoretical part theses analyses the meaning of investment, securities and evolution of portfolio theory. This part also includes the meaning of risks and return, as well as the importance of diversification and optimization. Theses empirical part contains fundamental analysis and interpretation of „Swedbank“ researchers data on the Baltic market, followed by return index analysis of Baltic markets industry sectors in order to name the most efficient of them. After that, companies working in those sectors were analyzed and using constrains of return and risks portfolios were created.

The primary purpose of the study is to carry out an investigation into the role of listed real estate stocks in a mixed asset class investment portfolio in South Africa and what weighting should be allocated to this asset class. The study involved collecting data from the last ten years from January 1995 to December 2004 and then comparing the data against data collected from the investment management industry, especially those entities with exposure to direct property and listed property stock holdings over long periods. The study investigates the benefits of listed property stocks in an investment portfolio in South Africa, and empirically tests the data collected using the mean-variance theory to determine the impact of listed property stocks on the performance (maximising returns) and risk (minimising risk) of investment portfolios. The Elton and Gruber computer programme is used to test the data to give an optimal weighting to the sector and produce an efficient frontier. The weightings are then used to work out the efficiency of a portfolio as a result of the inclusion of listed property stocks, and comparing it to a portfolio of just two asset classes, namely equities and bonds, at 75% and 25% weightings respectively. The results demonstrated the benefits offered by listed real estate and revealed that the sector should be treated as a separate asset class from equities due to lower correlation of returns between these two asset classes. It also demonstrated that an increased allocation to the listed property sector would have resulted in better investment performance over the past ten years. The conclusions consistently pointed to the increased asset allocation of listed real estate in investment portfolios as the best long-term solution to diversification and volatility, as long as the liquidity and size of the sector improves. It is concluded in this study, that investment managers have underscored the relevance and allocation of listed real estate in investment portfolios in the past ten years, thus not optimising the performance and risk of their portfolios, as expected in retirement fund portfolios to the benefits of the members. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

This paper investigates optimal portfolio strategies in a market with partial information on the drift. The drift is modelled as a function of a continuous-time Markov chain with finitely many states which is not directly observable. Information on the drift is obtained from the observation of stock prices. Moreover, expert opinions in the form of signals at random discrete time points are included in the analysis. We derive the filtering equation for the return process and incorporate the filter into the state variables of the optimization problem. This problem is studied with dynamic programming methods. In particular, we propose a policy improvement method to obtain computable approximations of the optimal strategy. Numerical results are presented at the end. (author's abstract)