The author reports on situations experienced by investors which clearly break the rules and norms of accepted rationality, for example when a fall in the price of an asset is accompanied, contrary to the classical hypotheses, by a fall in demand. He outlines a general theory for the fields of choice and the marginal rates of substitution within the framework of a specific referential of the economic subject, of a psychological nature and structured by time-values, and the framework of a limited rationality. In this important and timely book, Blanqué made a powerful claim for positive investment in order to avoid fanciful illusions. He assigned it the task of understanding what is happening in today's world. Blanqué argued that the investment world contains many elements of a fairy tale and showed that a mere confrontation with reality leaves its mark on the impressive procession of theoretical, sacred cows, of established beliefs and truths. As does the confrontation with crises.

I conduct two studies that investigate the behavioral characteristics of mutual fund managers. First study, The Performance of Mutual Funds on Private Information, looks at the dimension of investment skills of fund managers. The investment skills of mutual fund managers can be assessed by their ability to generate private information. In this study, by investigating the simultaneous actions of fund managers and corporate managers, we estimate how much the actions of fund managers can be attributed to private information. Using the information of insiders' transactions as a proxy for the managers' private information, our performance measure, PS (Private Shares), captures variations in skills among fund managers, suggesting that the funds with higher PS outperform the funds with lower PS. The finding that PS is positively related to future fund performance is consistent with our conjecture that fund managers who actively trade on private information have better managerial skills than the ones that do not trade on private information. In the second study, Impact of Religious Belief on Asset Management Industry, we investigate the effects of religion on the investing behavior of fund managers. We propose a measure of corporate social responsibility propensity (CSRP) by fund managers that captures the level of a manager's tendency to invest in firms that engage in socially responsible activities. Grounded in the basis of ethics and morality, religious belief is shown to have a positive impact on a fund manager's investment in firms with good corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. The positive association between religiosity and CSRP is particularly strong in the sample of non-institutional funds. On the performance aspect, we find that funds in the highly religious region with a higher propensity to invest in socially responsible firms tend to exhibit future performance deterioration. Our results suggest that local religiosity has a significant impact on the investing behavior of fund managers.

The accounting landscape shifted following the era of global financial crisis and accounting information continues to play a vital role. Philip O’Regan’s authoritative textbook provides readers with the tools and techniques to fruitfully analyse accounting and financial data. Updated to reflect changes in corporate governance, regulatory frameworks and new forms of IFRS, the text continues to shed light on the growing emphasis placed on the role of accounting information in formulating financial strategy. Features which add value to this third edition of Financial Information Analysis include case studies in every chapter with numerous supporting articles from the major financial presses, questions for review, and a comprehensive companion website. This essential textbook is core reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of finance and accounting.

This new edited volume consists of a collection of original articles written by leading industry experts in the area of factor investing.The chapters introduce readers to some of the latest research developments in the area of equity and alternative investment strategies.Each chapter deals with new methods for constructing and harvesting traditional and alternative risk premia, building strategic and tactical multifactor portfolios, and assessing related systematic investment performances. This volume will be of help to portfolio managers, asset owners and consultants, as well as academics and students who want to improve their knowledge and understanding of systematic risk factor investing. A practical scope An extensive coverage and up-to-date researcch contributions Covers the topic of factor investing strategies which are increasingly popular amongst practitioners

This thesis examines the concept of mission investing (MI) and thus the role the mission of nonprofit organizations (NPO) plays when fungible financial assets are invested. In contrast to the traditional separation of programming and investment policies, MI stands for the explicit inclusion of the organization's mission into financial decisionmaking. Although initially developed in the context of grantmaking foundations, the concept of MI can be applied to any NPO with fungible assets. NPO as mission-driven organizations differ substantially from regular "for-profit" companies in the way they evaluate organizational performance. Therefore, questions regarding the assessment of desirability and the evaluation of investment opportunities arise. This thesis consists of four articles which all answer a different sub-question regarding the concept and logic of MI and thus adds to a more profound understanding of nonprofit investment management and complements existing theoretical analyses with empirical findings on value-based portfolio selection. In their exploratory approach, these four essays contribute to a holistic understanding of how investment decisions within a mission-oriented organization should be planned and evaluated - independent of their social or financial nature. In applying a logic framework approach, it is shown that the strict separation of social (such as grants) and financial investments within NPO leads to a misallocation of scarce resources. Only by judging both types of investments based on their combined ultimate mission-related impact, an optimal allocation of the initial inputs can be achieved. Thanks to the linkage of both, social and financial investments, the evaluation of investments within NPO is not about either financial return or impact only, but everything in between (i.e., hybrid investments, such as venture philanthropy or impact investments). Further, this thesis also bridges linguistic gaps between nonprofit research and finance and supplies practitioners with insights on how to structure investment processes in NPO and what effects they may expect from mission-based portfolio selection. This allows for a more effective allocation of tax-exempt funds in terms of achieving higher degrees of mission-effectiveness.

SECURITY ANALYSIS AND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT. This 5th Edition , is thoroughly revised and updated. It describes techniques, vehicles, and strategies of the funds of an individual investor(s).For the students of Management, Commerce, Professional Course of CA, CS, ICWA, Professional of Financial Institutions and Policy Makers.

In the first essay, we evaluate the performance of commodity mutual funds. The use of commodities to hedge inflation risk and diversify portfolios is generally considered to be an important consideration for portfolio management. Direct investment in commodities or commodity derivatives requires that investors have significant assets and/or expertise in these commodities or their respective derivatives markets. As an alternative to direct investment, investors in recent years have increasingly resorted to the use of commodity based mutual funds. At issue is the question of whether or not these funds are delivering the benefits investors expect. In this paper we evaluate the performance, persistence, market timing and selectivity of four categories of mutual funds whose returns are based on commodity prices over the time period from each fund's inception through December, 2012. Our results indicate that these funds have not been able to create positive alphas for their investors; have negative or insignificant performance persistence; and have no market timing ability. Some of the categories of funds, however do exhibit some selectivity. We did find that when these commodity based funds' performance was evaluated during specific time periods of market downturns (e.g., the 2000 stock market downturn and the 2007 financial crisis), their performance was significantly positive which indicates that these funds provide a good hedge during bear markets/financial crises. The second essay evaluates the performance and diversification benefits of international ETFs for U.S. investors during and after the recent financial crisis. Our results show that U.S. ETFs outperform all categories of international ETFs for the period of our study (January 2008 - June 2013); they have higher average monthly returns, lower risk (standard deviation of returns), higher risk-adjusted performance (Sharpe, Sortino, and Treynor ratios) and the highest cumulative returns over the entire period. When we form equally weighted portfolios of each ETF category and compute their risk-adjusted performance, we again find that U.S. ETF portfolios had the best performance for the entire period. We also find that U.S. ETFs have the lowest tracking error during the entire period. Most of these ETFs passively track the benchmark and do not manage for positive alpha. Previous research has questioned the diversification benefits of international investing during times of financial distress. We find that international ETFs are highly dependent on major U.S. indices, therefore, they offer limited diversification benefits for U.S. investors. "In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'." Warren Buffett The third essay evaluates the performance of Wide Moat stocks. Companies that have sustainable competitive advantages should be able to create a barrier (moat) to prevent or lessen competition from other firms. The wider the moat the greater the barrier and the more secure the company's profitability. Using the Morningstar classification of "Wide Moat" stocks, we construct annually rebalanced equal- and value-weighted portfolios to analyze their performance in order to determine if they deliver superior performance relative to standard benchmark portfolios. The period for our analysis extends from June 2002 through May 2014. We find that the "Wide Moat" portfolios outperform both the S & P 500 and Russell 3000 indices generating higher average monthly and annualized returns, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino Ratio, Treynor Ratio, Omega Ratio, Upside Potential Ratio, M2, M2 Alpha and cumulative returns. When we compute alpha using Carhart four-factor and Fama-French five-factor models, we find that "Wide Moat" portfolios had significantly positive risk-adjusted alphas with both the models. "Wide Moat" portfolios also lost less value during the 2007-2009 financial crisis compared to both S & P 500 and Russell 3000. In conclusion, we find that "Wide Moat" stocks have created significant value for their investors over the course of our study.