Investment Strategies : Can accumulated stock recommendations provide positive abnormal return?

Abstract: Abstract   Purpose The purpose of this thesis is; “To find out whether a strategy based on accumulated stock recommendations are able to outperform mutual funds and/or index funds with similar holdings over time”. Background During the past 30 years the interest for the financial market has been ever increasing. With the increased interest for the financial market, also an increased interest for the different investment alternatives have developed, thus also the amount of various financial products. Further there has been a discussion whether the different investment products actually add value to the investors. Method To be able to reach our purpose we have constructed a portfolio containing stocks based on recommendations. We have also come up with a method in order to decide the weights of the individual stocks in our portfolio. Further, we have used existing theories in order to estimate the return and the standard deviation. We have also benchmarked our portfolio against popular funds on the market. Conclusion We have seen that our portfolio during the six years running have performed better than the existing funds and also resulted in a lower standard deviation i.e. risk. Thus the results are applicable on our specific data, more research is needed in order to make any statements of statistical significance.