The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) asserts that, at all times, the price of a security reflects all available information about its fundamental value. The implication of the EMH for investors is that, to the extent that speculative trading is costly, speculation must be a loser's game. Hence, under the EMH, a passive strategy is bound eventually to beat a strategy that uses active management, where active management is characterized as trading that seeks to exploit mispriced assets relative to a risk-adjusted benchmark. The EMH has been refined over the past several decades to reflect the realism of the marketplace, including costly information, transactions costs, financing, agency costs, and other real-world frictions. The most recent expressions of the EMH thus allow a role for arbitrageurs in the market who may profit from their comparative advantages. These advantages may include specialized knowledge, lower trading costs, low management fees or agency costs, and a financing structure that allows the arbitrageur to undertake trades with long verification periods. The actions of these arbitrageurs cause liquid securities markets to be generally fairly efficient with respect to information, despite some notable anomalies.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis believes that it is impossible for an investor to outperform the market because all available information is already built into stock prices. However, some anomalies could persist in stock markets while some other anomalies could appear, disappear and re-appear again without any warning. A Special Issue on "Efficiency and Anomalies in Stock Markets" will be devoted to advancements in the theoretical development of market efficiency and anomaly in the Stock Market, as well as applications in Stock Market efficiency and anomalies.

The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition in finance for nearly thirty years. It states that securities prices in financial markets must equal fundamental values, either because all investors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfect arbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological and institutional evidence. In actual financial markets, less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents and empirically evaluates models of such inefficient markets. Behavioral finance models both explain the available financial data better than does the efficient markets hypothesis and generate new empirical predictions. These models can account for such anomalies as the superior performance of value stocks, the closed end fund puzzle, the high returns on stocks included in market indices, the persistence of stock price bubbles, and even the collapse of several well-known hedge funds in 1998. By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets.

The past twenty years have seen an extraordinary growth in the use of quantitative methods in financial markets. Finance professionals now routinely use sophisticated statistical techniques in portfolio management, proprietary trading, risk management, financial consulting, and securities regulation. This graduate-level textbook is intended for PhD students, advanced MBA students, and industry professionals interested in the econometrics of financial modeling. The book covers the entire spectrum of empirical finance, including: the predictability of asset returns, tests of the Random Walk Hypothesis, the microstructure of securities markets, event analysis, the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, the term structure of interest rates, dynamic models of economic equilibrium, and nonlinear financial models such as ARCH, neural networks, statistical fractals, and chaos theory. Each chapter develops statistical techniques within the context of a particular financial application. This exciting new text contains a unique and accessible combination of theory and practice, bringing state-of-the-art statistical techniques to the forefront of financial applications. Each chapter also includes a discussion of recent empirical evidence, for example, the rejection of the Random Walk Hypothesis, as well as problems designed to help readers incorporate what they have read into their own applications.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Hull, course: Current Issues Financial Management, language: English, abstract: The study examines and critical reviews the literature for the different implications based on the three levels of the Efficient Market Hypothesis for investors and company managers. If the weak form of the EMH holds, the technical analyse is useless, but ninety percent of traders in London are using it. If the semi-strong-form holds the fundamental analysis, study of published accounts, search for undervalued companies are useless and investors should be focus on diversification and avoiding of transaction costs. Furthermore the semi-strong form would imply for managers, that accounting disclosure to deceived shareholders is useless, the company market value is the best indicator for the company value and management decisions, the company does not need specialists for the timing of issues and there are no opportunities for a cheap acquisition of another company. At least if the strong-form of the EMH holds, it would imply that even with insider information it would not be possible to get above average returns. The literature shows, that the studies of EMH have made an important contribution to our understanding of the security market. It also shows that in some cases scientific results do not strong influence the behaviour of manager and investors in the “real world”.

Updated with a new chapter that draws on behavioral finance, the field that studies the psychology of investment decisions, the bestselling guide to investing evaluates the full range of financial opportunities.