Low-risk effect: evidence, explanations and approaches to enhancing the performance of low-risk investment strategies

The purpose of the paper is to select the right market proxy for calculating the expected return, since critically evaluating proxies or selecting the correct proxy market portfolio is essential for portfolio management because the change in the market portfolio proxy affects returns. In this study, monthly data of equity indices are evaluated to find out the better market proxy. The indices taken are BSE 30 (Sensex), Nifty 50, BSE 100, BSE 200, and BSE 500. The macroeconomic variables used in the study are industrial production index (IIP), consumer price index (CPI), money supply (M1), and exchange rate in India. To avoid the influence of COVID-19, the research period was from January 2013 to December 2019 to critically evaluate these proxies in order to find the most appropriate market proxy. This paper reveals a noteworthy relationship between stock market returns and macroeconomic factors, while suggesting that the BSE 500 is a better choice for all equity indices, as the index also shows a significant relationship with all macroeconomic variables. BSE500 is a composite index comprising all sectors with low, mid and large cap securities, therefore it reflects the impact of macroeconomic factors most efficiently, taking it as a market proxy. This study was carried out in the context of India and can be replicated for other countries.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between different audit committee attributes and company performance in Bahrain. This paper investigates the impact of audit committee independence, size, and meeting frequency on company performance (employing ROE, ROA, and Tobin’s Q). Data from all 14 non-financial publicly listed companies on Bahrain Bourse during 2005–2019 were used. The results revealed that companies with independent audit committees and big audit committees in terms of size are performing poorly. It is also shown that the number of audit committee meetings does not affect company performance. Further, this study failed to find any association between the number of audit committee meetings and company performance. The findings show that shareholders might lack knowledge of the importance of corporate governance mechanisms. The results of this study should be of potential interest to different stakeholders, including regulators, investors, and auditors, in their attempts to improve company performance and monitoring mechanisms in emerging economies.

This research explores the influence of foreign ownership on non-financial public shareholding firms in the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE). The study involved an investigation into the connection between non-Jordanian ownership and the company growth opportunity, stock liquidity, leverage, dividend policy and business output. The results highlight that foreign ownership can provide improved corporate governance practices by playing a decisive role in increasing the growth opportunity and enhancing the firms’ market valuation, as measured by Tobin’s Q. Moreover, the findings indicate that companies with foreign board membership have better operating performance and higher firm value. The rewards were reaped by foreign investors based on their superior monitoring ability, which affects the decisions made and actions taken by management.