The South African white maize market is considered to be significantly more volatile than any other agricultural product traded on the South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX). This accentuates the need to effectively manage price risk, by means of hedging, to ensure a more profitable and sustainable maize production sector (Geyser, 2013:39; Jordaan, Grové, Jooste, A. & Jooste, Z.G., 2007:320). However, hedging at lower price levels might result in significant variation margins or costly buy–outs in order to fulfil the contract obligations. This challenge is addressed in this study by making use of technical analysis, focusing on the development of a practical and applicable composite technical indicator with the purpose of improving the timing of price risk management decisions identified by individual technical indicators. This may ultimately assist a producer in achieving a higher average hedge level compared to popular individual technical indicators. The process of constructing a composite indicator was commenced by examining the prevailing tendency of the market. By making use of the Directional Movement Index (DMI), as identified in the literature study, the market was found to continually shift between trending prices (prices moving either upwards or downwards) and prices trading sideways. Consequently, implementing only a leading (statistically more suitable for trading markets) or lagging (statistically more suitable for trending markets) technical indicator may generate false sell signals, as demonstrated by the application of these technical indicators in the white maize market. This substantiated the motivation for compiling a composite indicator that takes both leading and lagging indicators into account to more accurately identify hedging opportunities. The composite indicator made use of the Relative Strength Index (RSI) and Stochastic oscillator as leading indicators, and the Exponential Moving Average (EMA) and Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) as lagging indicators. The results validated the applicability of such a composite indicator, as the composite indicator outperformed the individual technical indicators in the white maize market. The composite indicator achieved the highest average hedge level, the lowest average sell signals generated over the entire period, as well as the highest average hedge level as a percentage of the maximum price over the entire period. Hence, the composite indicator recognised hedging opportunities more accurately compared to individual technical indicators, which ultimately led to higher achieved hedging levels. / MCom. (Risk management), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

YouTube is an online video sharing platform where users can distribute and consume video and other types of content. The rapid technological advancement along with the proliferation och technological gadgets has led to the phenomenon of viral videos where videos and content garner hundreds of thousands if not million of views in a short span of time. This thesis looked at the reason for these viral content, more specifically as it pertains to videos on YouTube. This was done by building a predictor model using two different approaches and extracting important features that causes video popularity. The thesis further observed how the subsequent features impact video popularity via partial dependency plots. The knn model outperformed logistic regression model. The thesis showed, among other things that YouTube channel and title were the most important features followed by comment count, age and video category. Much research have been done pertaining to popularity prediction, but less on deriving important features and evaluating their impact on popularity. Further research has to be conduced on feature influence, which is paramount to comprehend the causes for content going viral. / YouTube är en online-plattform där användare kan distribuera och konsumera video och andra typer av innehåll. Den snabba tekniska utvecklingen tillsammans med spridningen av mobila plattformar har lett till fenomenet virala videor där videor får hundratusentals, om inte miljontals, visningar på kort tid. I arbetet undersöktes orsaken till virala videor på YouTube. Det gjordes genom att bygga två modeller för att förutspå videopopularitet och därefter analysera viktiga egenskaper som orsakar denna. Resultaten visade att Knn- modellen ger bättre resultat än logistisk regression. Arbetet visade bland annat att YouTube-kanalen och titeln var de viktigaste egenskaperna som driver popularitet, följt av antal kommentarer på en video, videons ålder och videons kategori. Vidare forskning är dock nödvändig inom detta område. Mycket forskning har gjorts för att förutsäga populariteten hos videor, men mindre fokus har lagts på att analysera deras viktiga egenskaper och utvärdera deras inverkan på populariteten.