A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MM in Finance and Investment March 2015 / Individual investors often do not have access to share trading information and even if they do, they may not be able to understand or accurately interpret this information. Investors rely on financial analysts’ forecasts and stock recommendations in order to make profitable investment decisions. The role of the financial analyst is an important one with two key objectives: earnings forecasts and stock recommendations (Loh and Mian 2006). These financial analysts play a significant role in the efficient functioning of global stock markets. The aim of the financial analyst is to evaluate shares trading on the stock market and their future price appreciation or depreciation to develop new buy, hold or sell recommendations to maximize shareholder wealth. The extant literature recognizes that new buy, hold and sell recommendations made by financial analysts have a substantial impact on the market (Womack, 1996). Research on financial analysts has become prevalent in financial literature with the promotion of financial analysts to the level of integral economic proxies worthy of individual examination (Bradshaw, 2011). The aim of this research report is to investigate whether financial analysts’ stock recommendations enhance or destruct shareholder wealth. The extant literature on financial analysts’ stock recommendations and forecasts suggests that the analysts’ recommendations have both a significant and an insignificant effect on stock prices in the market following the months after the change in recommendation is made. The accuracy of the financial analysts’ stock recommendations are measured in the months following the change in recommendation through determining if the recommendation outperforms the market benchmark. This report examines the effects of analysts’ recommendations on the performance of stocks on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and concludes through determining if the share underperforms or outperforms the market benchmark surmising that to a varying degree there is value to be found in financial analysts’ stock recommendations for the individual investor.

A research report submitted to the School of Economic and Business Sciences, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment (50%) of the requirements for degree of Master of Commerce in Finance. March 2016 / This study attempts to determine the possible effects of individualism on industry volatility. The implications of this for behavioural finance are extensive, showing firstly that different industries react differently to behavioural biases and secondly that overconfidence is a possible driver of the positive effect of individualism on industry volatility. The country selection process was relatively objective, taking two countries with high individualism indexes and two with low indexes and including one with a medium index value. The result was a sample of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China and Taiwan. The industry selection process was more subjective. Industries were selected which should have a higher propensity to behavioural biases with lower book to market ratios (software and computer services industry and pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry) and other industries which should not be as strongly affected by behavioural biases (banks, mining, oil and gas producers, and mobile telecommunications industries). In order to correct for ARCH effects the series’ were modelled using a GARCH (1, 1) model. The resulting residuals, which showed no autocorrelation, were then used to conduct panel data regressions on each of the industries. The results confirmed that individualism had a positive effect on volatility in the industries which were expected (software and computer services and pharmaceuticals and biotechnology industries). However, it was also determined that the banks industry was significantly affected by individualism, an effect which it was hypothesised, was due to the individualism of employees as opposed to investors. / MT2017

by Wai Chi-kin. / Abstract also in Chinese / Bibliography: leaves 174-175 / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1982

Ng Anny. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-142). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Problem Definition --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Thesis Organization --- p.3 / Chapter 2 --- Chinese Text Summarization Using Genetic Algorithm --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- Related Work --- p.6 / Chapter 2.3 --- Genetic Algorithm Approach --- p.10 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Fitness Function --- p.11 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Genetic operators --- p.14 / Chapter 2.4 --- Implementation Details --- p.15 / Chapter 2.5 --- Experimental results --- p.19 / Chapter 2.6 --- Limitations and Future Work --- p.24 / Chapter 2.7 --- Conclusion --- p.26 / Chapter 3 --- Event Extraction from Chinese Financial News --- p.27 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.28 / Chapter 3.2 --- Method --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Data Set Preparation --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Positive Word --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Negative Word --- p.31 / Chapter 3.2.4 --- Window --- p.31 / Chapter 3.2.5 --- Event Extraction --- p.32 / Chapter 3.3 --- System Overview --- p.33 / Chapter 3.4 --- Implementation --- p.33 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Event Type and Positive Word --- p.34 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Company Name --- p.34 / Chapter 3.4.3 --- Negative Word --- p.36 / Chapter 3.4.4 --- Event Extraction --- p.37 / Chapter 3.5 --- Stock Database --- p.38 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Stock Movements --- p.39 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Implementation --- p.39 / Chapter 3.5.3 --- Stock Database Transformation --- p.39 / Chapter 3.6 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.40 / Chapter 3.6.1 --- Performance measures --- p.40 / Chapter 3.6.2 --- Evaluation --- p.41 / Chapter 3.7 --- Conclusion --- p.45 / Chapter 4 --- Mining Frequent Episodes --- p.46 / Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.46 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- Definitions --- p.48 / Chapter 4.2 --- Related Work --- p.50 / Chapter 4.3 --- Double-Part Event Tree for the database --- p.56 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Complexity of tree construction --- p.62 / Chapter 4.4 --- Mining Frequent Episodes with the DE-tree --- p.63 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Conditional Event Trees --- p.66 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Single Path Conditional Event Tree --- p.67 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Complexity of Mining Frequent Episodes with DE-Tree --- p.67 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- An Example --- p.68 / Chapter 4.4.5 --- Completeness of finding frequent episodes --- p.71 / Chapter 4.5 --- Implementation of DE-Tree --- p.71 / Chapter 4.6 --- Method 2: Node-List Event Tree --- p.76 / Chapter 4.6.1 --- Tree construction --- p.79 / Chapter 4.6.2 --- Order of Position Bits --- p.83 / Chapter 4.7 --- Implementation of NE-tree construction --- p.84 / Chapter 4.7.1 --- Complexity of NE-Tree Construction --- p.86 / Chapter 4.8 --- Mining Frequent Episodes with NE-tree --- p.87 / Chapter 4.8.1 --- Conditional NE-Tree --- p.87 / Chapter 4.8.2 --- Single Path Conditional NE-Tree --- p.88 / Chapter 4.8.3 --- Complexity of Mining Frequent Episodes with NE-Tree --- p.89 / Chapter 4.8.4 --- An Example --- p.89 / Chapter 4.9 --- Performance evaluation --- p.91 / Chapter 4.9.1 --- Synthetic data --- p.91 / Chapter 4.9.2 --- Real data --- p.99 / Chapter 4.10 --- Conclusion --- p.103 / Chapter 5 --- Mining N-most Interesting Episodes --- p.104 / Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.105 / Chapter 5.2 --- Method --- p.106 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Threshold Improvement --- p.108 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Pseudocode --- p.112 / Chapter 5.3 --- Experimental Results --- p.112 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Synthetic Data --- p.113 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Real Data --- p.119 / Chapter 5.4 --- Conclusion --- p.121 / Chapter 6 --- Mining Frequent Episodes with Event Constraints --- p.122 / Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.122 / Chapter 6.2 --- Method --- p.123 / Chapter 6.3 --- Experimental Results --- p.125 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- Synthetic Data --- p.126 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- Real Data --- p.129 / Chapter 6.4 --- Conclusion --- p.131 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.133 / Chapter A --- Test Cases --- p.135 / Chapter A.1 --- Text 1 --- p.135 / Chapter A.2 --- Text 2 --- p.137 / Bibliography --- p.139

This dissertation aims to investigate the asset pricing implications of the stock option's implied volatility term structure. We mainly focus on two directions: the volatility term structure of the market and the volatility term structure of individual stocks. The market volatility term structure, which is calculated from prices of index options with different expirations, reflects the market's expectation of future volatility of different horizons. So the market volatility term structure incorporates information that is not captured by the market volatility itself. In particular, the slope of the volatility term structure captures the expected volatility trend. In the first part of the thesis, we investigate whether the market volatility term structure slope is a priced source of risk or not. We find that stocks with high sensitivities to the proxies of the VIX term structure slope exhibit high returns on average. We further estimate the premium for bearing the VIX slope risk to be approximately 2.5% annually and statistically significant. The effect cannot be explained by other common risk factors, such as the market excess return, size, book-to-market, momentum, liquidity and market volatility. We extensively investigate the robustness of our empirical results and find that the effect of the VIX term structure risk is robust. Within the context of ICAPM, the positive price of VIX term structure risk indicates that it is a state variable which positively affects the future investment opportunity set. In the second part of the thesis, we provide a stylized model that explains our empirical results. We build a regime-switching rare disaster model that allows disasters to have short and long durations. Our model indicates that a downward sloping VIX term structure corresponds to a potential long disaster and an upward sloping VIX term structure corresponds to a potential short disaster. It further implies that stocks with high sensitivities to the VIX slope have high loadings on the disaster duration risk, thus earn higher risk premium. These implications are consistent with our empirical results. In the last part, we study the relationship between individual stock's volatility term structure and the stock's future return. We use a measure of stock's implied volatility term structure slope, defined as the difference between 3-month and 1-month implied volatility from at-the-money options, to demonstrate that option prices contain important information for the underlying equities. We show that option volatility term structure slopes are significant in explaining future equity returns in the cross-section. And we further find evidence that the implied volatility term structure is a measure of event risk: firms with the most negative volatility term structure are those for which the market anticipates news that may affect stock price within one month. Relevant events include, but are not limited to, earnings announcements.

A ascensão de um grande número de pessoas em países em desenvolvimento para a classe média, no inicio do século XXI, aliado ao movimento político para transferência de base energética para os biocombustíveis vêm aumentando a pressão sobre os preços das commodities agrícolas e apresentando novas oportunidades e cenários administrativos para os produtores agrícolas dessas commodities, em especial aquelas que podem se diversificar em muitos subprodutos para atender diferentes mercados, como o de alimentos, químico, têxtil e de energia. Nesse novo ambiente os produtores podem se beneficiar dividindo adequadamente a produção entre os diferentes subprodutos, definindo o melhor momento para a comercialização através de estoques, e ainda controlar sua exposição ao risco através de posições no mercado de derivativos. A literatura atual pouco aborda o tema da diversificação e seu impacto nas decisões de produção e comercialização agrícola e portanto essa tese tem o objetivo de propor um modelo de decisão fundado na teoria de seleção de portfólios capaz de decidir a divisão da produção entre diversos subprodutos, as proporções a serem estocadas e o momento mais adequado para a comercialização e por fim as posições em contratos futuros para fins de proteção ou hedge. Adicionalmente essa tese busca propor que esse modelo seja capaz de lidar com incerteza em parâmetros, em especial parâmetros que provocam alto impacto nos resultados, como é o caso dos retornos previstos no futuro. Como uma terceira contribuição, esse trabalho busca ainda propor um modelo de previsão de preços mais sofisticado que possa ser aplicado a commodities agrícolas, em especial um modelo híbrido ou hierárquico, composto de dois modelos, um primeiro modelo fundado sob a teoria de processos estocásticos e do Filtro de Kalman e um segundo modelo, para refinar os resultados do primeiro modelo de previsão, baseado na teoria de redes neurais, com a finalidade de considerar variáveis exógenas. O modelo híbrido de previsão de preços foi testado com dados reais do mercado sucroalcooleiro brasileiro e indiano, gerando resultados promissores, enquanto o modelo de decisão de parâmetros de produção, comercialização, estocagem e hedge se mostrou uma ferramenta útil para suporte a decisão após ser testado com dados reais do mercado sucroalcooleiro brasileiro e do mercado de milho, etanol e biodiesel norte-americano. / The rise of a large number of people in developing countries for the middle class at the beginning of the century, combined with the political movement to transfer the energy base for biofuels has been increasing pressure on prices of agricultural commodities and presenting new opportunities and administrative scenarios for agricultural producers of these commodities, especially those who may diversify into many products to meet different markets such as food, chemicals, textiles and energy. In this new environment producers can achieve benefits properly dividing production between different products, setting the best time to market through inventories, and still control their risk exposure through positions in the derivatives market. The literature poorly addresses the issue of diversification and its impact on agricultural production and commercialization decisions and therefore this thesis aims to propose a decision model based on the theory of portfolio selection able to decide the division of production between different products, the proportions to be stored and timing for marketing and finally the positions in futures contracts to hedge. Additionally this thesis attempts to propose that this model is capable of dealing with uncertainty in parameters, especially parameters that cause high impact on the results, as is the case of expected returns in the future. As a third contribution this paper seeks to also propose a model more sophisticated to forecast prices that can be applied to agricultural commodities, especially a hybrid or hierarchical model, composed of two models, a first one based on the theory of stochastic processes and Kalman filter and a second one to refine the results of the first prediction model, based on the theory of neural networks in order to consider the exogenous variables. The hybrid model for forecasting prices has been tested with real data from the Brazilian and Indian sugar ethanol market, generating promising results, while the decision model parameters of production, commercialization, storage and hedge proved a useful tool for decision support after being tested with real data from Brazilian sugar ethanol market and the corn, ethanol and biodiesel market in U.S.A.

Tang Him John. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-80). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgment --- p.iii / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.1 --- Linear Time Series --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1.2 --- Mixture Models --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1.3 --- EM algorithm --- p.6 / Chapter 1.1.4 --- Model Selection --- p.6 / Chapter 1.2 --- Main Objectives --- p.7 / Chapter 1.3 --- Outline of this thesis --- p.7 / Chapter 2 --- Finite Gaussian Mixture ARMA-GARCH Model --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.9 / Chapter 2.1.1 --- "AR, MA, and ARMA" --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1.2 --- Stationarity --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1.3 --- ARCH and GARCH --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1.4 --- Gaussian mixture --- p.13 / Chapter 2.1.5 --- EM and GEM algorithms --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2 --- Finite Gaussian Mixture ARMA-GARCH Model --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3 --- Estimation of Gaussian mixture ARMA-GARCH model --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3.1 --- Autocorrelation and Stationarity --- p.20 / Chapter 2.3.2 --- Model Selection --- p.24 / Chapter 2.4 --- Experiments: First Step Prediction --- p.26 / Chapter 2.5 --- Chapter Summary --- p.28 / Chapter 2.6 --- Notations and Terminologies --- p.30 / Chapter 2.6.1 --- White Noise Time Series --- p.30 / Chapter 2.6.2 --- Lag Operator --- p.30 / Chapter 2.6.3 --- Covariance Stationarity --- p.31 / Chapter 2.6.4 --- Wold's Theorem --- p.31 / Chapter 2.6.5 --- Multivariate Gaussian Density function --- p.32 / Chapter 3 --- Finite Mixture-of-Expert ARMA-GARCH Model --- p.33 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.33 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Mixture-of-Expert --- p.34 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Alternative Mixture-of-Expert --- p.35 / Chapter 3.2 --- ARMA-GARCH Finite Mixture-of-Expert Model --- p.36 / Chapter 3.3 --- Estimation of Mixture-of-Expert ARMA-GARCH Model --- p.37 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Model Selection --- p.38 / Chapter 3.4 --- Experiments: First Step Prediction --- p.41 / Chapter 3.5 --- Second Step and Third Step Prediction --- p.44 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Calculating Second Step Prediction --- p.44 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- Calculating Third Step Prediction --- p.45 / Chapter 3.5.3 --- Experiments: Second Step and Third Step Prediction . --- p.46 / Chapter 3.6 --- Comparison with Other Models --- p.50 / Chapter 3.7 --- Chapter Summary --- p.57 / Chapter 4 --- Stable Estimation Algorithms --- p.58 / Chapter 4.1 --- Stable AR(1) estimation algorithm --- p.59 / Chapter 4.2 --- Stable AR(2) Estimation Algorithm --- p.60 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Real p1 and p2 --- p.61 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Complex p1 and p2 --- p.61 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Experiments for AR(2) --- p.63 / Chapter 4.3 --- Experiment with Real Data --- p.64 / Chapter 4.4 --- Chapter Summary --- p.65 / Chapter 5 --- Conclusion --- p.66 / Chapter 5.1 --- Further Research --- p.69 / Chapter A --- Equation Derivation --- p.70 / Chapter A.1 --- First Derivatives for Gaussian Mixture ARMA-GARCH Esti- mation --- p.70 / Chapter A.2 --- First Derivatives for Mixture-of-Expert ARMA-GARCH Esti- mation --- p.71 / Chapter A.3 --- First Derivatives for BYY Harmony Function --- p.72 / Chapter A.4 --- First Derivatives for stable estimation algorithms --- p.73 / Chapter A.4.1 --- AR(1) --- p.74 / Chapter A.4.2 --- AR(2) --- p.74 / Bibliography --- p.80

Fung Pui Cheong Gabriel. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-93). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract (English) --- p.i / Abstract (Chinese) --- p.ii / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Contents --- p.v / List of Figures --- p.ix / List of Tables --- p.x / Chapter Part I --- The Very Beginning --- p.1 / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.2 / Chapter 1.1 --- Contributions --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2 --- Dissertation Organization --- p.4 / Chapter 2 --- Problem Formulation --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Defining the Prediction Task --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Overview of the System Architecture --- p.8 / Chapter Part II --- Literatures Review --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- The Social Dynamics of Financial Markets --- p.12 / Chapter 3.1 --- The Collective Behavior of Groups --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- Prediction Based on Publicity Information --- p.16 / Chapter 4 --- Time Series Representation --- p.20 / Chapter 4.1 --- Technical Analysis --- p.20 / Chapter 4.2 --- Piecewise Linear Approximation --- p.23 / Chapter 5 --- Text Classification --- p.27 / Chapter 5.1 --- Document Representation --- p.28 / Chapter 5.2 --- Document Pre-processing --- p.30 / Chapter 5.3 --- Classifier Construction --- p.31 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Naive Bayes (NB) --- p.31 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Support Vectors Machine (SVM) --- p.33 / Chapter Part III --- Mining Financial Time Series and Textual Doc- uments Concurrently --- p.36 / Chapter 6 --- Time Series Representation --- p.37 / Chapter 6.1 --- Discovering Trends on the Time Series --- p.37 / Chapter 6.2 --- t-test Based Split and Merge Segmentation Algorithm ´ؤ Splitting Phrase --- p.39 / Chapter 6.3 --- t-test Based Split and Merge Segmentation Algorithm - Merging Phrase --- p.41 / Chapter 7 --- Article Alignment and Pre-processing --- p.43 / Chapter 7.1 --- Aligning News Articles to the Stock Trends --- p.44 / Chapter 7.2 --- Selecting Positive Training Examples --- p.46 / Chapter 7.3 --- Selecting Negative Training Examples --- p.48 / Chapter 8 --- System Learning --- p.52 / Chapter 8.1 --- Similarity Based Classification Approach --- p.53 / Chapter 8.2 --- Category Sketch Generation --- p.55 / Chapter 8.2.1 --- Within-Category Coefficient --- p.55 / Chapter 8.2.2 --- Cross-Category Coefficient --- p.56 / Chapter 8.2.3 --- Average-Importance Coefficient --- p.57 / Chapter 8.3 --- Document Sketch Generation --- p.58 / Chapter 9 --- System Operation --- p.60 / Chapter 9.1 --- System Operation --- p.60 / Chapter Part IV --- Results and Discussions --- p.62 / Chapter 10 --- Evaluations --- p.63 / Chapter 10.1 --- Time Series Evaluations --- p.64 / Chapter 10.2 --- Classifier Evaluations --- p.64 / Chapter 10.2.1 --- Batch Classification Evaluation --- p.69 / Chapter 10.2.2 --- Online Classification Evaluation --- p.71 / Chapter 10.2.3 --- Components Analysis --- p.74 / Chapter 10.2.4 --- Document Sketch Analysis --- p.75 / Chapter 10.3 --- Prediction Evaluations --- p.75 / Chapter 10.3.1 --- Simulation Results --- p.77 / Chapter 10.3.2 --- Hit Rate Analysis --- p.78 / Chapter Part V --- The Final Words --- p.80 / Chapter 11 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.81 / Appendix --- p.84 / Chapter A --- Hong Kong Stocks Categorization Powered by Reuters --- p.84 / Chapter B --- Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Classification --- p.85 / Chapter C --- "Precision, Recall and F1 measure" --- p.86 / Bibliography --- p.88

In this study, a Prediction Accuracy Based Hill Climbing Feature Selection Algorithm (AHCFS) is created and compared with an Error Rate Based Sequential Feature Selection Algorithm (ERFS) which is an existing Matlab algorithm. The goal of the study is to create a new piece of an algorithm that has potential to outperform the existing Matlab sequential feature selection algorithm in predicting the movement of S&P 500 (^GSPC) prices under certain circumstances. The two algorithms are tested based on historical data of ^GSPC, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed by both as the classifier. A prediction without feature selection algorithm implemented is carried out and used as a baseline for comparison between the two algorithms. The prediction horizon set in this study for both algorithms varies from one to 60 days. The study results show that AHCFS reaches higher prediction accuracy than ERFS in the majority of the cases.

Under deregulated electric market, electricity price is no longer set by the monopoly utility company rather it responds to the market and operating conditions. Offering the right amount of electricity at the right time with the right bidding price has become the key for utility companies pursuing maximum profits under deregulated electricity market. Therefore, electricity market clearing price (MCP) forecasting became essential for decision making, scheduling and bidding strategy planning purposes. However, forecasting electricity MCP is a very difficult problem due to uncertainties associated with input variables.<p> Neural network based approach promises to be an effective forecasting tool in an environment with high degree of non-linearity and uncertainty. Although there are several techniques available for short-term MCP forecasting, very little has been done to do mid-term MCP forecasting. Two new artificial neural networks have been proposed and reported in this thesis that can be utilized to forecast mid-term daily peak and mid-term hourly electricity MCP. The proposed neural networks can simulate the electricity MCP with electricity hourly demand, electricity daily peak demand, natural gas price and precipitation as input variables. Two situations have been considered; electricity MCP forecasting under real deregulated electric market and electricity MCP forecasting under deregulated electric market with perfect competition. The PJM interconnect system has been utilized for numerical results. Techniques have been developed to overcome difficulties in training the neural network and improve the training results.