The main purpose of the study is to investigate Sweden's four large banks, concerningrisk and return, to see if there are any differences between them. The paper will alsoinvestigate the following sub sections: are there any differences in how the banks havesucceeded in managing geographically targeted funds and if there are any differencesin how funds are performing according to the fund size.The study is based on a quantitative method and has a deductive approach. Theselection consists of all of the four banks Swedish and Nordic funds (according tomorningstar.se 's categories "Sverige" and "Norden"). The study is based on secondarydata gathered from sources such as Morningstar, Affärsvärlden, Dagens Industri andthe Swedish National Banks websites.Swedbank Robur has performed the highest results in the case of Swedish funds.Handelsbanken has performed the highest results in the case of Nordic funds and thetotal of all funds that are in the study. Based on the results of the study it was possibleto distinguish a link between fund size and the annual return. .

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a valuation model of a Private Equity firm is interpreted into a management control system within the company's different organizational levels. A case study was developed based on the infra-net company Eltel. The management control systems developed by Malmi and Brown (2008)(1) was used to characterize the control systems at each organizational level. The building blocks of this system are planning, cybernetic, reward/compensation, administrative and culture. Miller and O'Learys (2007)(2) theory of mediating instruments and technology roadmaps was applied to analyze the mediating process of the valuation model.

During the last decades major changes has occurred at the financial markets, meaning an increasing supply and a greater variation of financial instruments. The saving habits of the Swedish people have gone from traditional bank deposits to investments in equities, funds and bonds. All this together with the great rise in the stock market at the late 90?s has brought words like risk and return up-to-date, and is the background to the development of a new law concerning financial advising which come into force the 1th of July 2004. The contents of the thesis can be described as three bricks, representing the survey questions.

The study aims to understand the underlying factor why McDonald's customers return despiteprevious failure customer experiences. Why do customers come back to the company thatcontributes to the former dissatisfaction? McDonald's attempt to maintain unceasingpurposeful emergence fail at the local level, where the customer contact occurs. McDonald'sofferings and customers' bounded rationality results in that customers are satisfied with an"ok" experience, which adds to their low expectations of McDonalds. This makes clear thatMcDonald's does not have to make an effort through constant adaptation at the local level toachieve a "great" level of satisfaction.

Since January 1st 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The intention of the introduction of IFRS is to achieve international harmonization of accounting rules in order to make financial reports more comparable between companies from different countries. The purpose of financial reports presented in accordance with IFRS is to provide information that is useful to the users of the information. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the information regarding goodwill and the goodwill impairment test, presented in accordance with IFRS, in fact is useful to a specific group of accounting information users, namely equity analysts. An empirical study is conducted, based on interviews with seven Swedish equity analysts.

On 1 January 2005, IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)was mandatory for all listed companies within the European Union. The introduction is to create a transparent and consistent reporting. Mainly to provide companies, investors and financiers the same access to world capital markets. Since the introduction of IFRS, the goodwill value is determined by annual impairment tests. If an impairment of goodwill is a fact the goodwill decreases in value.

This paper investigates the possibilities to construct automatized portfolios based on optimizations strategies that could outperform comparable indexes. The study is based on time-series of Swedish stocks dating from 1986 to 2006. In the research four different portfolio optimization techniques were studied. These were: the Classical Markowitz Approach, Mean-Absolute-Deviation, Minimum-Regret and Conditional Value-at-Risk of which the three latter are based on generated scenarios. The behaviour of these models was studied for different choices of parameters such as backward time-horizon and targeted average return.

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Title: Inflation and Investments, with Focus on Inflation-linked Bonds.Investors face many types of risks when allocating assets in a portfolio, e.g. volatility and inflation risk. Inflation risk will mainly affect investments in the long perspective. This thesis will examine those risks that an investor is commonly exposed to when allocating assets in a portfolio and in particular inflation-linked risk and how to eliminate it. We examine the correlation between different assets and inflation to determine the assets? ability to hedge inflation risk.

Theability to beat the market is one of the most discussed topics in finance. Thereare very few investors that manage to accomplish this over longer periods oftime. Most of the financial research claims that this is impossible unless theinvestor increase the risk in the portfolio. However numerous of researchershave shown that it exist anomalies on the stock market which either indicatesthat the Capital Asset Pricing Modell (CAPM) or Fama and French three-factormodel fails to explain stock returns or that the market is not fully efficient.One investor that has claimed that the stock market is not fully efficient andthat it is possible to generate abnormal return is Benjamin Graham. Graham isone of the legends on Wall Street and he has shown that by using few variablesbased on public information, one can manage to beat the market over longer timeperiods.There arejust a few studies that have tested Graham?s criteria?s, however all of themindicates that they work but that the standard deviation might be higher forthe portfolios.

Introduction: The concept of CSR was first coined in the 1950?s and refers to corporate vol-untary work to contribute to a sustainable society. In Sweden, companies within the finance sector are among the worst when it comes to implementing CSR in their daily work. The debate on whether companies should engage in CSR activities or not, is extremely relevant nowadays. Right now we are facing a time where the demand on companies to take their social responsi-bility becomes more intensified.

The number of LBOs in Sweden has increased during the last years and the current market trend is positive. MostLBOs involves private companies, but a few concerns public corporations on the national share market. In this thesis we will examine the conditions of a LBO of Cloetta Fazer AB. The purpose is to study existing conditions of Cloetta Fazer AB and to examine pros and cons with the deal. Based upon information presented in the frame of reference and in the empirical part, two cash flow valuations have been carried out.

On 1 January 2005, IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)was mandatory for all listed companies within the European Union. The introduction is to create a transparent and consistent reporting. Mainly to provide companies, investors and financiers the same access to world capital markets. Since the introduction of IFRS, the goodwill value is determined by annual impairment tests. If an impairment of goodwill is a fact the goodwill decreases in value.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to analyze if there is a correlation between stock prices and the amount of searches of the companies names on Google. The theories used in the study were Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). Regressions analysis is used as the statistical method to see if there is a significant correlation between the stock prices and the amout of searches of the company name on Google. The data used were the rate of return of three companies (ABB, Oriflame and Sandvik) on the Nasdaq OMX Nordic stock market, the rate of return of the Nasdaq OMX Nordic stock market index (OMX Stockholm_PI) and the Google search frequency from Google Trends on each company. The result showed no significance and the conclusion of the thesis is that there is no significant correlation between the three studied companies and their search frequency on the search engine Google..

Abstract: The fashion industry is perhaps the most unpredictable one where change occurs very rapidly. In order to be attractive and interesting in this competitive industry, a brand must constantly be up to date and differentiated from other brands to attract the consumers. This has given rise to an increasing growth of brands that cooperate for marketing reasons and more specifically, clothing retailers that perform designer collaborations with exclusive designers to create limited collections.Studies describing the effects of those collaborations on the retailers brands are rare and especially from a consumer perspective. Since H&M has been a pioneer in designer collaborations and has done it more times and for more years than any other retailer we have conducted our study on their case. Our intention was to investigate how the designer collaborations have affected the brand equity and image of H&M, if the collaborations have increased the willingness to pay for H&M's other ranges and if they have affected H&M's ability to extend its brand to higher price segments, through an experimental study.