No description available.

This article identifies the best models for forecasting the volatility of daily exchange returns of developing countries. An emerging consensus in the recent literature focusing on industrialized countries has noted the superior performance of the Fractionally Integrated Generalized Autoregressive Conditionally Heteroscedastic (FIGARCH) model in the case of industrialized countries, a result that is reaffirmed here. However, we show that when dealing with developing countries' data the IGARCH model results in substantial gains in terms of the in-sample results and out-of-sample forecasting performance. (authors' abstract)

Many empirical studies show that both equity volatility and its trading volume have long range dependence and can be modeled as fractional integrated processes. The objective of this study is to investigate relationship between volatility and volume.We adopt four estimators of volatility, which includes the squared log returns, historical volatility, iterative t estimators and $GARCH$ estimators. The results show that among the four estimators squared log returns usually have the largest integration orders and produce hightest ratios of fractional cointegration. The fractional integrated orders are estimated separately and jointly, and the cointegration parameters are estimated by ordinary least squares, a narrow band frequency domain least squares method and a semiparametric estimator of Whittle likelihood. Models are also established when volatility and volume are not fractional cointegrated.

This thesis focuses on guaranteed investment funds, which have become very popular among investors in the Czech Republic in recent years. The reason for this popularity is the conservativeness of a typical domestic investor, who appreciates the lower bound for the value of his investment. Guaranteed funds characteristically have a complex structure and valuation of their profitability based solely on intuition is therefore impossible. This analysis tries to provide an answer to the question if investing in these funds is reasonable. A large part of the thesis is dedicated to the option theory and option valuation methods, including the famous Black-Scholes formula, as guaranteed investment funds have the characteristics of an option. Thanks to the complicated structure of these products, the analysis itself is done by Monte Carlo simulation.