Even though today´s world unwinds on the increasing way of the globalisation, investors are aware of the possibilities the international markets offer and distance is not an issue any more, they are still governed by the “home bias factor“. This phenomenon implies that investors tend to prefer investing in domestic securities rather than entering the global market. Swedish investors are not the exception and the issue of the attraction of foreign fixed income securities is highlighted even more when we have found out there is lack of academic research about the topic from the perspective of Swedish investors. To narrow down the research subject and provide a reader with an interesting approach, we decided to examine the attraction of foreign government bonds from the perspective of Swedish investors. At the beginning of the paper we raised three research questions and defined the objective of the paper in questioning the existence of reasons to invest in foreign government bonds. Another research question was defined as identifying our local investor, who is entering the global market and last, but not least, what investing strategy do we recommend him to follow. Along the paper we proposed to apply a decent level of informative as well as a scientific approach to provide a reader with a valuable study concerning pre-defined topic. To reach more concrete outcomes of the study we have accepted couple of assumtions which we have identified ourselves with and we have stressed them especially during the theoretical part of the paper. After conducting the comprehensive analysis of the Swedish market for government bonds we have identified a huge gap between the demand and supply for such bonds and based on the discussion concerning the opportunities and risks connected with such investments we have defined our investor. Under given assumptions, as the most probable case of occurance we consider a rational investor, who is offsetting the balance of interest rate sensitive assets and liabilities simultaneously looking for the best possible yield, the lowest possible risk and sound level of diversification. During the empirical analysis, namely examination of the national yield curves we set first, however very limited investment strategy. After the incorporation of the portfolio theory, currency rate risk and the existence of instruments covering the foreign currency exposure we have come into a conclusion that our investor does not have to necessarily prefer a security from the depicted efficient frontier, but he can employ other securities as well. As a consequence, when using 100% hedging he can use whichever security on the global market. At the conclusion, stated findings imply another investigation, since our research was based on very strong assumptions presented during the study. Thus it by far does not provide the reader with a comprehensive investment analysis, which some readers might be interested in. However, even from the beginning we claimed that we do not have such an ambitious goal.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-1285 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Machac, Erik, Cucurnia, Renato |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet, Umeå universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet, Umeå : Handelshögskolan vid Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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