Capital costCapital costs are fixed, one-time expenses incurred on the purchase of land, buildings, construction, and equipment used in the production of goods or in the rendering of services. In other words, it is the total cost needed to bring a project to a commercially operable status. Whether a particular cost is capital or not depend on many factors such as accounting, tax laws, and materiality. Capital costs include expenses for tangible goods such as the purchase of plants and machinery, as well as expenses for intangibles assets such as trademarks and software development.
Business educationBusiness education is a branch of education that involves teaching the skills and operations of the business industry. This field of education occurs at multiple levels, including secondary and higher education Business studies At secondary level, Business Studies, as it is often called, typically combines elements of accountancy, finance, marketing, organizational studies, human resource management and economics. The range of topics is designed to give the student a general overview of the various elements of running a business.
Random walk hypothesisThe random walk hypothesis is a financial theory stating that stock market prices evolve according to a random walk (so price changes are random) and thus cannot be predicted. The concept can be traced to French broker Jules Regnault who published a book in 1863, and then to French mathematician Louis Bachelier whose Ph.D. dissertation titled "The Theory of Speculation" (1900) included some remarkable insights and commentary. The same ideas were later developed by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Paul Cootner in his 1964 book The Random Character of Stock Market Prices.
Portfolio insurancePortfolio insurance is a hedging strategy developed to limit the losses an investor might face from a declining index of stocks without having to sell the stocks themselves. The technique was pioneered by Hayne Leland and Mark Rubinstein in 1976. Since its inception, the portfolio insurance strategy has been dubiously marketed as a product (similar to an insurance policy). However, this is a misnomer as it is not a policy and there is no insurer of last resort. This strategy involves selling futures of a stock index during periods of price declines.
Complete marketIn economics, a complete market (aka Arrow-Debreu market or complete system of markets) is a market with two conditions: Negligible transaction costs and therefore also perfect information, Every asset in every possible state of the world has a price. In such a market, the complete set of possible bets on future states of the world can be constructed with existing assets without friction. Here, goods are state-contingent; that is, a good includes the time and state of the world in which it is consumed.
Black–Litterman modelIn finance, the Black–Litterman model is a mathematical model for portfolio allocation developed in 1990 at Goldman Sachs by Fischer Black and Robert Litterman, and published in 1992. It seeks to overcome problems that institutional investors have encountered in applying modern portfolio theory in practice. The model starts with an asset allocation based on the equilibrium assumption (assets will perform in the future as they have in the past) and then modifies that allocation by taking into account the opinion of the investor regarding future asset performance.
Brownian model of financial marketsThe Brownian motion models for financial markets are based on the work of Robert C. Merton and Paul A. Samuelson, as extensions to the one-period market models of Harold Markowitz and William F. Sharpe, and are concerned with defining the concepts of financial assets and markets, portfolios, gains and wealth in terms of continuous-time stochastic processes. Under this model, these assets have continuous prices evolving continuously in time and are driven by Brownian motion processes.
Efficient frontierIn modern portfolio theory, the efficient frontier (or portfolio frontier) is an investment portfolio which occupies the "efficient" parts of the risk–return spectrum. Formally, it is the set of portfolios which satisfy the condition that no other portfolio exists with a higher expected return but with the same standard deviation of return (i.e., the risk). The efficient frontier was first formulated by Harry Markowitz in 1952; see Markowitz model. A combination of assets, i.e.
Momentum investingMomentum investing is a system of buying stocks or other securities that have had high returns over the past three to twelve months, and selling those that have had poor returns over the same period. While momentum investing is well-established as a phenomenon no consensus exists about the explanation for this strategy, and economists have trouble reconciling momentum with the efficient market hypothesis and random walk hypothesis. Two main hypotheses have been submitted to explain the momentum effect in terms of an efficient market.
Mutual fund separation theoremIn portfolio theory, a mutual fund separation theorem, mutual fund theorem, or separation theorem is a theorem stating that, under certain conditions, any investor's optimal portfolio can be constructed by holding each of certain mutual funds in appropriate ratios, where the number of mutual funds is smaller than the number of individual assets in the portfolio. Here a mutual fund refers to any specified benchmark portfolio of the available assets. There are two advantages of having a mutual fund theorem.
