An Empirical Analysis of the Performance of the Ghana Stock Exchange and Treasury Bills

The study compared risk and returns characteristics of stock exchange traded shares and treasury bills in Ghana to find out which of the two instruments gives better rewards to investors. We made use of annualized returns of these instruments and applied statistical measures of average annual returns, standard deviations and co-efficient of variations for the analysis. Comparing investor ‘A' (Treasury Bills Investment) and investor ‘B' (GSE AllShare Investment) as sample study for the period of 1990 to 2010, it was revealed that GSE All-Shares Index has higher risk and higher return. This result confirms the general expectation of the relationship between rate of returns and the risk associated with investment – the higher the risk, the higher the return. The Study further revealed that the market performance of both treasury bills and GSE All-Share Index outperformed the rate at which prices were rising (average inflation rate) for the period 1990-2010