Muslim vs. Non-Muslim views on Zionism

Today there is constant debate over US foreign policy in the Middle East. One important aspect of this debate centers around the issue of Israel???s existence as a state, and the nature of that state. More specifically the question that will be examined asks how Muslim opinions will differ from non-Muslims when concerning Zionism. I hypothesize that Muslim opinions on the subject will not only be much stronger than non-Muslim opinions but they will also identify much more strongly with the Palestinian minority due to the fact that many Palestinians are Muslims. Conversely, non-Muslim opinions will probably tend to be more neutral towards the issue due to either lack of personal sentiment towards the issue or due to not being well informed. As a distinct category, Jewish people would be expected to respond as strongly as Muslims, except in favor of Israel, because of a strong personal connection to the issue. Overall this paper will try to discover if this hypothesis holds when applied to students at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. It will do so by examining a cross-section of all of these groups of students and based on the results of these examinations it will try to provide a better general idea about how this specific group group of students views this issue and if the hypothesis is proven true or false. This examination will go beyond a simple vote of support for or against the State of Israel, but look at levels of support for different versions of that State

Evaluation of pairs trading strategy at the Brazilian financial market

Pairs trading is a popular trading strategy that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies in order to obtain profit. The idea is simple: find two stocks that move together and take long/short positions when they diverge abnormally, hoping that the prices will converge in the future. From the academic point of view of weak market efficiency theory, pairs trading strategy shouldn’t present positive performance since, according to it, the actual price of a stock reflects its past trading data, including historical prices. This leaves us with a question, does pairs trading strategy presents positive performance for the Brazilian market? The main objective of this research is to verify the performance and risk of pairs trading in the Brazilian financial market for different frequencies of the database, daily, weekly and monthly prices for the same time period. The main conclusion of this simulation is that pairs trading strategy was a profitable and market neutral strategy at the Brazilian Market. Such profitability was consistent over a region of the strategy’s parameters. The best results were found for the highest frequency (daily), which is an intuitive result

Evaluation of pairs trading strategy at the Brazilian financial market

Pairs trading is a popular trading strategy that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies in order to obtain profit. The idea is simple: find two stocks that move together and take long/short positions when they diverge abnormally, hoping that the prices will converge in the future. From the academic point of view of weak market efficiency theory, pairs trading strategy shouldn’t present positive performance since, according to it, the actual price of a stock reflects its past trading data, including historical prices. This leaves us with a question, does pairs trading strategy presents positive performance for the Brazilian market? The main objective of this research is to verify the performance and risk of pairs trading in the Brazilian financial market for different frequencies of the database, daily, weekly and monthly prices for the same time period. The main conclusion of this simulation is that pairs trading strategy was a profitable and market neutral strategy at the Brazilian Market. Such profitability was consistent over a region of the strategy’s parameters. The best results were found for the highest frequency (daily), which is an intuitive result.pairs trading, quantitative strategy, asset allocation

M of a kind: A Multivariate Approach at Pairs Trading

Pairs trading is a popular trading strategy that tries to take advantage of market inefficiencies in order to obtain profit. Such approach, on its classical formulation, uses information of only two stocks (a stock and its pairs) in the formation of the trading signals. The objective of this paper is to suggest a multivariate version of pairs trading, which will try to create an artificial pair for a particular stock based on the information of m assets, instead of just one. The performance of three different versions of the multivariate approach was assessed for the Brazilian financial market using daily data from 2000 to 2006 for 57 assets. Considering realistic transaction costs, the analysis of performance was conducted with the calculation of raw and excessive returns, beta and alpha calculation, and the use of bootstrap methods for comparing performance indicators against portfolios build with random trading signals. The main conclusion of the paper is that the proposed version was able to beat the benchmark returns and random portfolios for the majority of the parameters. The performance is also found superior to the classic version of the strategy, Perlin (2006b). Another information derived from the research is that the proposed strategy picks up volatility from the data, that is, the annualized standard deviations of the returns are quite high. But, such event is “paid” by high positive returns at the long and short positions. This result is also supported by the positive annualized sharpe ratios presented by the strategy. Regarding systematic risk, the results showed that the proposed strategy does have a statistically significant beta, but it isn’t high in value, meaning that the relationship between return and risk for the trading rules is still attractive.pairs trading, asset allocation, quantitative strategy