Does commodity exposure benefit traditional portfolios? Evidence from India

The emergence of Bitcoin in 2009 has received considerable attention surrounding the validity of cryptocurrencies as a viable and, in some jurisdictions, a legal currency alternative. Despite widespread concern that these cryptocurrencies are fostering the environment within which a substantial bubble can occur, it is important to analyze whether these new assets are behaving similarly to major international currencies. This paper investigates the effects of international monetary policy changes on bitcoin returns using a GARCH (1.1) estimation model. The results indicate that monetary policy decisions based on interest rates taken by the Federal Open Market Committee in the United States significantly impact upon bitcoin returns. After controlling for international effects, we find significant evidence of volatility effects driven by United States, European Union, United Kingdom and Japanese quantitative easing announcements. These results show that, despite its nature and ideals, bitcoin seems to be subject to the same economic factors as traditional fiat currencies, and is not entirely unaffected by government policies. This result has implications for investors using bitcoin as a hedging or diversification tool. In addition, we contribute to the existing debate regarding the classification of bitcoin as an asset class, by illustrating that bitcoin volatility exhibits various reactions that bear resemblance to both currency pairs and store-of-value assets.

This paper is in pursuit of analyzing and elongating prior research on the performance evaluation of mutual funds by a comparative analysis with three categories of 82 Saudi equity funds during 2011 to 2016 using Fama’s decomposition model. The paper also made an attempt to explore the relationship with the risk reward ratio to the relative performance measure in predicting the future performance of the Saudi equity fund returns. The empirical results show that Saudi local equity funds perform better followed by Arabian and international/global equity funds in terms of expected signs and diagnostic tests.

Balanced scorecard model is a method to evaluate and control programs with adequate consistency. According to it, a certain organization is evaluated and controlled in terms of financial aspect, together with growth and learning, internal business processes and customer aspects. This research is practical in purpose and a descriptive inferential method has been used to collect data in addition to utilizing five-scale Likert questionnaire. In order to increase the accuracy of the study, all 320 employees of post company have been under evaluation. A one-sample t-test has been used to analyze the questions of the study. Furthermore, Friedman test has been used to investigate the differences among groups. The results of testing the hypotheses indicate the effect of growth and learning of the employees of post company, as well as internal business processes, customer and financial aspects on the performance of the post company. Moreover, Friedman test probing the differences among groups shows that internal business processes and customer variables have the most significant impact upon the performance of the post company, while growth and learning and financial aspects have the least significant effect on the performance of the post company.