During recent years, financial innovation has given rise to numerous structured investment opportunities aimed towards the general public. These have enabled private investors to engage in high-risk investments offering as much as 400 per cent leverage while oftentimes not fully having grasped the risk involved. The issuers of these securities have been criticized for using advertising of a too aggressive and misleading nature.By presenting 819 potential investors with two different investment opportunities yielding the same return over a six day period, we have aimed to assess whether the inclination of being affected by judegmental heuristics varies with factors such as knowledge, overall attitude towards the asset class, risk appetite and experience from previous investments.We have observed that investors' perception of the attractiveness of an investment can be distorted by altering the information presented to the investor. However, our findings show that this tendency decreases with an increased level of knowledge, experience and risk appetite..

In recent years, awareness of the climate change has increased around the world. Environmental issues have been taking into consideration, both by individuals and companies. Therefore the demands for new environmental friendly technology have increased, also known as cleantech. To further establish and develop cleantech it requires capital. Venture capitalists have as well seen the potential.To increase the number of Venture capital investments in cleantech, it is important the investments generate good returns.

This Degree project is a study about the Mortgage Cap, introduced in October of 2010, and its impact on the demand for rented apartments. The mortgage cap was introduced to decrease the households? loan-to-value ratio and thereby increase their economical resistance during times of financial instability.The past ten years Swedish households have continuously increased their average loan-to-value ratio. In an attempt prevent this negative development Finansinspektionen introduced a mortgage cap stating that banks should no longer grant mortgages corresponding to more than 85 percent of the property?s market value.In order to answer the main question two methods were used both a survey and two interviews.

A reforming trend is captured showing that countries are shifting from defined benefit pension systems towards defined contribution systems. The reforms have been justified through predictions that the defined benefit systems will not manage to provide good enough pensions to members in the future. The newer defined contribution pension plans often include individual financial accounts where individuals have the possibility to choose how a part of their pension savings should be invested. Sweden was early to introduce such a system, which at the moment provides more than 800 funds to choose from. The aim of this thesis is to capture the market risk associated with these individual investments and does so by using Monte Carlo simulations for six selected pension funds.

The purpose of this research was to examine what motivates and influences an individual to invest in a project or company through equity-based crowdfunding. The intention was therefore to identify internal and external motivation factors and examine how external social factors such as the Internet, other individuals? investment decisions and interaction in social groups affect an individual when he or she invests through equity-based crowdfunding. The results showed that both internal and external motivation factors are important components of an investment through equity-based crowdfunding. External motivators proved to be for example yields and helping entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this essay is to evaluate stock index bonds return to risk ratio in order to investigate to which degree an investor in a stock index bond take part of the underlying index return and what the investor must pay for the security of not losing his funds. In order to carry out this evaluation an average return per year and the Sharpe ratio will be calculated and a mean- standard deviation analysis will be made. All investigated stock index bonds are based on a Swedish underlying asset.The results show that the stock index bonds haven?t generated a higher risk adjusted return than its underlying asset. The stock index bonds took part of 57 % of the underlying assets return, and the loss of 10 percentage points per year for the stock index bonds compared to its underlying asset can be seen as the cost for the guarantee a stock index bond gives..

Intro: 80 percent of the Swedish population own shares. This makes Sweden the leading country in private investment in securities. It can be difficult for the private investor to know where, when and which security to invest in. The strategies are as ambivalent as the stock markets fluctuations. If the investor prefers to refrain from investing money himself, there are brokers who carry out these types of services.

The value investing philosophy, which can be traced at least to the teaching of Graham and Dodd in the 1930?s, entails identifying and investing in potentially under valued stocks with a potential for extraordinary returns. The focus of this thesis is to identify patterns and characteristics in financial accounting data preceding creation of shareholder value. The authors of this thesis utilize a multivariate discriminant analysis in order to identify indicators of value creation and subsequent extraordinary returns in value stocks. A discriminant function is derived which successfully identifies which value stocks will eventually become growth stocks.

 IAS 40 allows two methods of valuation for investment properties, fair value model and cost model. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what drive property companies to disclose their investment properties at fair value. In order to understand their choice, we use accounting choice theory and the three factors this theory describes, information asymmetry, allowing opportunism and agency costs. To answer our purpose, we have from a qualitative approach performed semi-structured interviews with respondents from five of the largest listed property companies in Sweden. The results suggest that firms have chosen the method that is most effective in the valuation of investment properties.

The following study aims to investigate the environmental conditions of the harbor of Sk?rhamn, a small fishing community on the west coast of Sweden. The interest to do so rose as a newly built apartment residence failed to connect the sewage pipes of 18 apartments, causing the untreated sewage running into the sea. The parameters accounted for are the C/N ratio, total organic carbon (TOC) as well as total nitrogen present (TN) and ?13C in the top ten centimeters of a sediment core retrieved in the Sk?rhamn harbour.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and analyze past development of mutual funds in large and small mutual fund companies and see if there are any differences between these two segments. Limitations on the number of funds have been made by choosing Nordic mutual fund companies that invest in emerging markets over an 11-year period. The study is made on 66 mutual funds managed by 13 mutual fund companies in which the segment of small fund companies includes seven fund companies with assets under management less than 100 billion SEK and the segment of large mutual fund companies includes six fund companies with assets under management more than 400 billion SEK. In the comparison of the segments the Sharpe ratio has been used to calculate the risk-adjusted return. The study shows small differences of the risk-adjusted return between the segments.

The Swedish stock-market gives investors an opportunity to benefit from the global growth while financing companies invests and contributes to a socio-economic development. Parallel to the ownership of the funds also follows a responsibility as companies in the funds affect society and the environment. The growth of savings in funds, combined with an increased focus on sustainability has developed SRI (socially responsible investment). Therefore it is interesting to examine whether responsibility is an exception, which only concerns SRI-funds or a general principle, which includes the whole Swedish stock-market.The results of the survey makes it clear that all the Swedish major banks actively works to integrate sustainability within the respective bank's business to achieve a more sustainable financial system. Thus concludes the investigation that responsible investments are a general principle on the Swedish mutual stock-market.How responsibility is integrated in fund management differ between the banks.

The swedish national environmental goals have different policies and developments connected to them in order to achieve the goals on time, but the implementation of the different policies differ and is hard to evaluate compared to the theoretical background. With this thesis I have chosen to investigate the climate investment programmes results in Östersund compared to its goals with a case study. The different projects within the climate investment programme have reduced the emissions of CO2, but not in the amount that was anticipated and a lot of the projects were within projects that the municipality already was developing or doing. .

The world economy of today is in an extensive financial crisis which has lead to the fact that people seek well placed investments and securing of capital, something that by many people can be found in forest investment. The price of forest estates has increased with 90 % during the last 5 years and marketing polls indicate a positive belief in the future among forest owners. The development of timber prices has not increased to the same extent as the forest property prices which implies that the property price not only reflect the yield value from the forest but also that the lumber value does not have such a meaningful role in the pricing of forest properties as proven earlier. This fact means that forest owners either invest their capital in forest in a speculative point of view or that the purchasers of forest properties invests in non monetary benefits that lacks a direct yield value. The purpose with this degree thesis is to increase the understanding of the pricing of forest properties with focus on the above mentioned fact.

This thesis analyzes the expected profitability in land based wind power plants. The expected profitability is calculated on the basis of a wind power project in Vartofta, Falköping. The information required to calculate the expected outcome is then concentrated to this project, which is in this thesis called project Näs. In project Näs they plan to build three wind power plants, with each an effect of 2 MWh. These wind power plants are very capital intensive investments with a long and uncertain payback time.