This study examines whether the “Sell in May and Go Away” (or Halloween) trading strategy still offers an opportunity to earn abnormal returns. In contrast to prior studies, we consider sample periods during which adequate investment instruments were available for an effective implementation...

This study compares the performance of different rebalancing strategies under realistic market conditions by reporting statistical significance levels. Our analysis is based on historical data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany and comprises three different classes of...

The old and simple investment strategy “Sell in May and Go Away” (also referred to as the “Halloween effect”) enjoys an unbroken popularity. Recent studies suggest that the Halloween effect even strengthened rather than weakened since its first publication by Bouman and Jacobsen (2002)....

Portfolio insurance strategies are used on both the institutional and the retail side of the asset management industry. While standard utility theory struggles to provide an explanation, this study justifies the popularity of portfolio insurance strategies in a behavioral finance context. We run...

This study examines the empirical relationship between the volatility indices VDAX as well as VDAX-New and the stock market index DAX. Extending prior international evidence, we document a negative relationship between the implied volatility indexes and the stock market index for the German...

It is often argued that Black-Scholes (1973) values overstate the subjective value of stock options granted to risk-averse and under-diversified executives. We construct a quot;representativequot; Swiss executive and extend the certainty-equivalence approach presented by Hall and Murphy (2002)...

We use a dynamic framework and panel methodology to investigate the determinants of a firms' time-varying capital structure. Our sample comprises 706 European firms from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. over the period from 1983 to 2002. If capital structure adjustment is costly, firms may...

This paper investigates the determinants of cash holdings for a comprehensive sample of Swiss non-financial firms between 1995 and 2004. The median Swiss firm holds almost twice as much cash and cash equivalents as the median US or UK firm. Our results indicate that asset tangibility and firm...