Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.7, The FOM University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, language: English, abstract: Especially after the 90ies, where the stock markets raised enormously, many private investors joined the stock market and were blended by abnormal profits and neglected possible losses. The same behavior could be observed before the Financial Crisis became reality. But each endless raising stock market would finally collapse, because stock prices are randomly and only driven by relevant news. The adjustment to the news is quickly. This is the theoretical argumentation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which will be evaluated in this paper. The author gives an overview about the EMH by explaining the basic principles and its mathematical formulation. The practical part evaluated the EMH on selected examples, where the theory could only be partly approved.

What are the central questions of economics and how do economists tackle them? This book aims to answer these questions in 100 essays, written by economists and selected from "The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics". It shows how economists deal with issues ranging from trade to taxation.

This is the Black & White version of the book, available at a discount, which does not include the research data and analysis tables. There is also a Full Colour version that includes all the research data and analysis tables. What is a Stock Market? How do stock markets operate? Who invests in a stock market and when is it an appropriate tool for investment? Why do we care if a stock market is efficient or not? Where can we find evidence of market efficiency? With what tools can we test market efficiency?These are some of the questions that this book approaches. The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is a theory in financial economics, developed by Eugene Fama, which states that asset prices fully reflect all available information. Thus, it is implied that stocks always trade at their fair value, making it impossible for investors to "beat the market" via technical or fundamental analysis, since market prices should only react to new information.There are three variants of the EMH: "weak," "semi-strong," and "strong" form. The weak form of the EMH claims that prices already reflect all past publicly available market information. The semi-strong form claims that prices reflect all publicly available information, thus price changes occur to reflect new publicly available information. The strong form adds to this that prices instantly reflect even hidden private "insider" information.Testing the EMH is no easy task: Quantifying the availability of information and its effect on prices and market efficiency is challenging, making research on the subject difficult, time consuming and open to criticism. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that markets at best reach semi-strong form efficiency, with weak form efficiency being the norm. However, even this is challenged by the critics of EMH, via concepts such as Behavioural Finance.This book aims to familiarise the reader with the concept of EMH, covering the fundamentals and relevant literature. We then discuss market efficiency tests for Weak Form Market Efficiency, examining in more detail the day-of-the-week effect and its significance on stock market efficiency. The day-of-the-week effect is defined as a pattern where a certain day of the week has abnormal returns continuously. It is an anomaly that violates the random walk hypothesis, and thus implies that a market is not Weak Form efficient.We put theory into practice through the Empirical Research section which is divided into two parts, looking at two different approaches to researching the day-of-the-week effect, via the examination of actual research examples on a small European stock exchange. Both of these Thesis tested the hypothesis of random walk to determine the authenticity of weak form market efficiency for a small emerging stock market within the EU (the Cyprus Stock Exchange).

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.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2004 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1 (A), University of Graz (Institute für Industrial Economics), language: English, abstract: This Master Thesis gives an overview of the research into the efficient market hypothesis from its first days in the 1950s to the present. The discussion of theoretical models and concepts is being complemented by a review of relevant empirical evidence from international capital markets. The thesis is completed by a brief outlook on newer research venues, including models employing behavioural finance approaches.

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. The debate is one of the biggest in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hangs on the answer. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo transforms the debate with a powerful new framework in which rationality and irrationality coexist—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency is incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo’s new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought—a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions about economics and investing, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how markets really work.

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.