3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Investor sentiment as a factor in an APT model: an international perspective using the FEARS index(2017) Solanki, Kamini NarendaTraditional finance theory surrounding the risk-return relationship is underpinned by the CAPM which posits that a single risk factor, specifically market risk, is priced into asset returns. Even though it is a popular asset pricing model, the CAPM has been widely criticised due to its unrealistic assumptions and the APT was developed to address the CAPM’s weaknesses. The APT framework allows for a multitude of risk factors to be priced into asset returns; implying that it can be used to model returns using either macroeconomic or microeconomic factors. As such, the APT allows for non-traditional factors, such as investor sentiment, to be included. A macroeconomic APT framework was developed for nine countries using the variables outlined by Chen, Roll, and Ross (1986) and investor sentiment was measured by the FEARS index (Da, Engelberg, & Gao, 2015). Regression testing was used to determine whether FEARS is a statistically significant explanatory variable in the APT model for each country. The results show that investor sentiment is a statistically significant explanatory variable for market returns in five out of the nine countries examined. These results add to the existing APT literature as they show that investor sentiment has a significant explanatory role in explaining asset prices and their associated returns. The international nature of this study allows it to be extended by considering the role that volatility spill-over or the contagion effect would have on each model.Item The law of one price on bitcoin(2016) Naidu, SriyaThe purpose of this study is to identify whether the Law of One Price theory holds across bitcoin exchanges in different countries given the uniquely defining characteristics of bitcoin. This was explored using Johansen’s Cointegration to extract the economic relationship between the time series sampled. It was demonstrated in the results that the Law does not always hold, however this was dependent on which bitcoin exchange is being used. Prices across the same bitcoin exchanges were likely to hold because of similar transaction costs and the ease of trading. For the time series where the Law of One price did not hold, the explanatory factors could include the bitcoin market illiquidity and purposeful disequilibrium. Bitcoin is a fairly new concept and has been press-worthy in the finance, economic and technological spheres. In South Africa, awareness of the digital currency is low, as is an understanding of its features and the impact on the economy as well as society as a whole. This study therefore aims to explore bitcoin in a finance context, in terms of the Law of One Price, while briefly gaining an understanding of the digital currency itself.