This diploma thesis investigates investment certificates for retail investors. The first chapter defines investment structured certificates. The second chapter is about availability of investment certificates for retail investors in the Czech Republic. The objectives of this chapter are a description of a present offer of securities dealers in the Czech Republic, a specification of decision criterions in choosing an online broker and a comparison of selected companies from a point of view of a client. Third chapter summarizes advantages and risks which are connected with investment certificates. The fourth chapter deals with a classification of structured products from various aspects and structures of investment certificates which are the most traded on the German exchange Scoach in Frankfurt. The aim is to provide an overview of each type of the investment certificate which contains description of specific parameters, structure and possible pay-off at maturity of investment certificate considering an underlying asset. The final part illustrates in practice one of more possible methods how to choose appropriate investment certificates. There is presented a process which is subsequently more described and applied on a demonstrative example of a hypothetical retail investor. The goal of the diploma thesis is comprehensively acquainted with investment certificates the reader, and shows one of the possible ways of picking appropriate investment certificates for an investor with a risk neutral profile.

The diploma thesis deals with financing problems of young tennis players development to reach the top ranking in professional tennis. On the basis of intimate analysis of tennis enviroment and crucial factors affecting this theme searches for solutions in form of private equity financing and attracting new investors.

For VC-backed startups, their investors – who are also their main stakeholders – play a critical role. Only a limited number of notable contributions regarding in-depth examinations of stakeholders in the turnaround process exist. Several research studies highlight the research gap with regard to stakeholder management in turnaround situations. Due to the small and insufficient body of literature regarding the role of VCCs in turnarounds, I conducted an exploratory, qualitative empirical study based on four comprehensive turnaround cases, interviewing 14 co-founders and investors. Through a grounded theory approach, I developed a turnaround model, which takes into account the VCCs’ involvement. This dissertation shows that the general value-adding services of VCCs are during a turnaround only partially apparent. Moreover, the importance of the agency theory was again confirmed. It became clear how important continuous monitoring is for investors in order to identify problems in a portfolio company. Additionally, the findings show how important a good relationship between all parties involved is and how trust and transparency are essential during a turnaround.

Empirical evidence indicates that companies that reduce information asymmetry by increased voluntary disclosures achieve several benefits, such as lower cost of capital, improved pricing, and liquidity of their shares. Despite the possibility of such benefits, many studies report varying degrees of voluntary disclosure behaviour that is attributable to various factors. Recent studies indicate that investors’ investment horizon has a significant effect on actions taken by management. Companies with predominantly short-horizon investors spend less on research and development, invest in shorter-term projects that are less profitable than longer-term projects, and are more likely to manipulate earnings to meet short-term earnings expectations. This study investigates whether investors’ investment horizon has an effect on the quality of companies’ information environment. Long-horizon investors should be familiar with their investee company’s risks and rewards, using both their own internal information gathering processes and the cumulative information disclosed by management over time. Moreover, over the course of a long-term relationship, they can become familiar with management’s capability to deliver long-term sustainable returns. Long-horizon investors should therefore be less concerned with short-term fluctuations of earnings and management’s public explanations and disclosures thereof. I hypothesise that higher (lower) proportions of long-horizon investors are associated with lower (higher) quality voluntary disclosure. The shareholder familiarity hypothesis was tested in this study, using an ordinary least squares regression. Voluntary disclosures were observed via the channel of companies’ websites. A checklist was compiled of best practices for online investor relations, and content analyses were conducted on the websites of 205 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Shareholder familiarity was proxied by shareholder stability, measured over nine years. The stability measure was lagged by one year to create a temporal difference between the shareholder profile and disclosure behaviour. I found that companies with a profile of unstable investors that are larger, younger, dual-listed and have a Big4 auditor have higher quality online investor relations practices. The hypothesis of a negative association between shareholder familiarity and voluntary disclosure quality is therefore accepted. This study extends the theory on information asymmetry and voluntary disclosure by providing evidence supporting the argument that investor horizon is a predictor of voluntary disclosure quality. The dictum of more is better does not hold in all scenarios. It is important for financial directors and investor relations officers to establish the investment horizon profile of their respective companies’ shareholders before they embark on extensive disclosure programmes. / Financial Intelligence

本研究探討私募折價幅度及私募前後績效之影響因素，並將應募人分為內部人、積極投資人以及消極投資人三種，觀察不同應募人下的私募，其私募前及私募後是否有累計異常報酬。 實證結果發現，在私募前股價表現與私募對象之關係方面，當私募對象為內部人時，在私募前45日股價即開始下挫，之後的累計異常報酬皆為負值，其原因可能為內部人藉由套利交易，先行在集中市場上賣出手中原有持股，再用較低價格認購私募新股，此舉不但能使手中持股的成本降低同時也能維持既有股權。關於私募半年後的股價表現，內部人及積極投資人私募後的累計異常報酬顯著為正，代表內部人在投資私募新股時，可能隱含著未來公司有較好的投資機會；至於積極投資人後續績效為正，可能代表積極投資人未來將會扮演監督者的角色，有助於提高公司的價值。迴歸分析也顯示，當公司私募的價格相對於公司在私募定價日當時的股價折價越多時，私募之後的累計異常報酬越低，代表私募折價會降低公司價值，傷害現有股東的權益。 / This study investigates the effect of private placements on stockholder wealth before/after the events based on cumulative abnormal return for three categories of investors, namely, the insiders, active investors and passive investors. For private placements with insider investors, significant negative abnormal return prior to private placements may reveal sell arbitrage taken by insiders while significant positive abnormal return subsequent to private placements supports signaling theory. Evidence showing significant negative relation between price discount on private placements and subsequent business performance implies the price discount reduces market value and hence harmful to existing shareholders’ wealth.

Diploma thesis Financial market and its legal aspects provides a general overview on financial market and in next chapters continues with collective investments via funds of collective investors as one of ways how a natural or legal person can participate in the financial market processes. In first two chapters the thesis provides a characteristics and more detailed description of the terms financial market and capital market. Second chapter then defines the division of capital market types of investment Instruments that are traded on the market and entities that are present in the financial market and are necessary for its functionality. The last sub-chapter of second chapter summarizes the general overview of the current situation and development of capital market in Czech Republic, together with providing Czech and European legislation that regulates the financial and capital market. Third chapter introduces the term collective investment together with investment companies and investment funds law, that serves as a main regulation for collective investments. In this chapter we can also find the advantages and disadvantages of investing via investment funds and main entities that operates in the financial market with connection to collective investments. Fourth chapter further defines investment...

75 Abstract: The investor compensation scheme is one of the indispensable elements contributing to the stability of capital markets. Protection of retail investors by providing the minimal guarantee in case of investment firm's inability to return securities or money to investors became an essencial instrument in order to restart the economy, particularly in times of economic recession. Given the transboundary nature of investments a single European legislation is not only appropriate, but also practically necessary measure to restore investors' confidence in investment firms and to increase the competitiveness of markets in financial services within the European continent. The investor compensation scheme is still not receiving full attention of Czech legal theory, therefore it is one of the ambitions of this thesis to provide its comprehensive analysis. The aim of my thesis is also to compare whether the Czech legislation of Securities Brokers Guarantee Fund complies with the requirements of European legislation and to analyse proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 97/9/ES on investor-compensation schemes and its effect on Securities Brokers Guarantee Fund. This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One deals with the genesis of the investor...

Background: The traditional neoclassical model of finance has assumed that all individuals act rationally and that they update their beliefs according to the information they have obtained to maximise their utility. This concept has been challenged by behavioural finance which has over the past decades become a new approach to better understand certain behaviours. Behavioural finance is a broad area which can be divided into different areas. One of them is investor behaviour, which will be the focus of this thesis. Research has shown that investors do not act rationally when deciding how much risk to take when considering an investment. Instead, it has been found that there are other factors that influence risk-taking in an investment, for instance gender, income, marital status and age. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to better understand if a selected group of demographic factors can affect the risk attitude investors in Sweden have with regard to their investments and to determine how well these factors explain the level of risk. The chosen demographic factors are gender, age, marital status and income. Method: This study is conducted using a deductive approach and employing a quantitative research method. A multinomial logistic regression was performed in the statistical program R. The data used is secondary data collected from financial counselling meetings of 111,265 clients during the period of 2018-01-03 to 2019-04-04. It is gathered from one of Sweden’s largest bank who measures customers’ risk tolerance by using a risk assessment tool that categorises risk tolerance into five levels where one is the lowest and five is the highest. Conclusion: Statistically significant results confirm that that the selected demographic factors have an effect on the risk level an investor takes. Males have higher risk tolerance than women, the older an individual is, the less risk the person wants to take, married people have higher risk tolerance than those that are not, and risk tolerance increases slightly with income.

During the work of this research project we were interested in mathematical techniques that give us an insight to the following questions: How do we understand the trading decisions made by a manager of a hedge fund and what influences these decisions? In what way does an illiquid market affect these decisions and the performance of the fund? And how does the payment scheme affect the investor's decisions? Based on existing work on hedge fund management, we start with a fund that can be modelled with one risky investment and one riskless investment. Next, subject to the hedge fund special reward scheme we maximise the expected utility of wealth of the manager, by controlling the percentage invested in the risky investment, namely the portfolio. We use stochastic control techniques to derive a partial differential equation (PDE) and numerically obtain its corresponding viscosity solution, which provides a weak notion of solutions to these PDEs. This is then taken to a liquidity constrained scenario, to compare the behaviour of the two scenarios. Using the same approach as before we notice that due to the liquidity restriction we cannot use a simple model to combine the risky and riskless investments as a total amount, and hence the PDE is one order higher than before. We then model an investor who is investing in the hedge fund subject to the manager's optimal portfolio decisions, with similar mathematical tools as before. Comparisons between the investor's expected utility of wealth and the utility of having the money invested in the risk-free investment suggests that, in some cases, the investor is paying more to the manager than the return he is receiving for having invested in the hedge fund, compared to a risk-free investment. For that reason we propose a strategic game where the manager's action is to allocate the money between the two assets and the investor's action is to add money to the fund when he expects profit. The result is that the investor profits from the option to reinvest in the fund, although in some extreme cases the actions of the manager make the investor receive a negative value for having the option.

Il y a eu 723 000 transactions dans l’immobilier ancien en 2013. Les ventes en viager ontreprésenté entre 0,5% et 1% de ce montant. Le taux de propriétaires de plus de 60 ansdépasse les 70%. Les seniors possèdent 700 milliards d’euros dans l’immobilier. Deux acteurscomposent le viager : un acheteur et un vendeur. Du côté de l’offre, les retraités sont de plusen plus nombreux à vendre en viager puisqu’ils ont besoin de liquidités : « house rich, cashpoor »1. Avec l’allongement de la durée de vie, les seniors doivent financer les frais de santéet le coût de la dépendance. Du côté de la demande, les particuliers comme les institutionnelssont à la recherche de diversifications patrimoniales. On trouve deux fois moins d’acheteursque de vendeurs en viager. Les institutionnels ont investi dans l’immobilier commercial et lesparticuliers dans le résidentiel depuis les années 90. Qu’en est-il pour le viager ? Pourquoi cemode d’acquisition n’a-t-il pas encore séduit les investisseurs ? Nous avons identifié deuxfreins majeurs : l’un financier, l’autre juridique. Nous avons simulé un portefeuille de 300viagers réels en utilisant 3 tables de mortalité. La modélisation de notre base de données apermis de trouver un faible taux de rendement interne sur l’espérance de vie du vendeur.Nous avons trouvé des TRI allant de 1,80% à 5,13% selon la table de mortalité retenue. Pourobtenir un taux de rendement interne de 5% sur l’espérance de vie du vendeur, en prenant lamoyenne des trois tables de mortalité, les investisseurs doivent faire baisser le montant de larente viagère de 17,55%.Nous avons recommandé différentes mesures en direction des pouvoirs publics afind’améliorer la liquidité du viager immobilier :-Déduire le paiement de la rente des autres revenus fonciers.-Déduire les intérêts d’emprunts ayant servi à financer le bouquet des autres revenus fonciers.-Reculer la durée de la clause résolutoire d’un à trois mois.-Ramener à 15 ans l’exonération des plus-values immobilières. / There were 723,000 transactions in existing property in 2013. Life annuity sales accounted forbetween 0.5% and 1% of this amount. The rate of home ownership among the over 60 agegroup exceeds 70%. Senior citizens own 700 million worth of real estate. Life annuity salesinvolve two players: a buyer and a seller. On the supply side, an increasing number ofpensioners are selling their property for life annuities since they need cash: «house rich, cashpoor». With longer life expectancy, senior citizens need to finance health and dependencycosts. On the demand side, both private and institutional investors seek asset diversification.However, there are twice as few buyers than sellers for life annuity property. Since thenineties, institutional investors have invested in commercial property, and private investors inresidential property. What is the situation for life annuity property sales ? We may wonderwhy this form of property acquisition has not so far attracted investors. We have identifiedtwo major hurdles: one financial, the other one legal. We have simulated a portfolio of 300real life annuity sales by using 3 mortality tables. The modeling of our data base enabled us toidentify a weak rate of return on the life expectancy of the seller. We found rates of internalreturn ranging from 1.8% to 5.13% according to the mortality table retained. In order toobtain a 5% rate of internal return on the life expectancy of the seller, taking the average ofthe three mortality tables, investors need to lower the amount of the life annuity by 17.55%.We have recommended different measures to the public authorities in order to improve theliquidity of property life annuities : deduct the payment of the annuity from other propertyincome, deduct the interests of loans used to fund the other property income mix and increasethe duration of the cancellation clause from one to three months.