Financial Institutions and Instruments - Essay Example

An investment strategy has more to do with responsibly, and often conservatively, managing an investment portfolio in order to maximize gains with a minimum of maintenance, a low number of transactions (and their attendant costs), and a minimum of risk. This paper will explore the investment strategy approach for the most part, whilst also exploring some of the more simplified and well-tested technical strategies of the trading approach. A simplified investment strategy is the one most likely to be employed by an ordinary person with a modest portfolio, a minimum amount of time to devote to managing that portfolio, and limited ability, desire, and/or resources to devote to the use of sophisticated analysis tools.

In other words, the kind of person who has a day job as opposed to being a fulltime day trader, and needs a strategy that includes a fair degree of automatic execution and pre-determined portfolio protection devices. Finding a consistent strategy that meets these requirements would be useful to a great number of people who are currently disadvantaged in the area of maximizing their investment gains by lack of financial resources, time, and expertise, whilst at the same time they may be very dependent on their investment performance for their future financial security needs.

Much work has been done in pursuit of a system that would consistently provide excess returns, with mixed results. The very existence of technical analysis seems to belie the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Some researchers have concluded that "technical rules do not earn excess profits over a simple buy-and-hold strategy," (Beechey, Gruen, and Vickery, 2000). However, there are aspects of market performance that are not completely explained by EMH, and the available evidence suggests that "financial market returns are partly predictable, in ways that sometimes conflict with the Efficient Market Hypothesis" (Beechey, et al, 2000).

Other discordant findings regarding the EMH versus actual stock performance include evidence that in the stock market, "shares with high returns continue to produce high returns in the short run (momentum effects). In the long run, shares with low price-earnings ratios, high book-to-market-value ratios, and other measures of 'value' outperform the market (value effects)." Further, "at times, asset prices appear to be significantly misaligned, for extended period," (Beechey, et al, 2000). Whenever inefficiencies such as misalignments or mispricings occur, an opportunity for excess returns also occurs - if someone with a technical analysis filter is watching for them and knows when and how to act on them.

At best it would seem the EMH semi-strong or weak version best describes what is observed in the markets. Therefore it would seem that there may, after all, be something to be gained from at least a cursory investigation of the technical analysis tools that are most readily available to the average investor, and that are easy to understand and use, and that is the criteria that was used when choosing technical analysis tools for inclusion in the investment strategy that will be outlined herein.St. George's Bank has been traded on the Australian exchange since 1992, and is currently the fifth largest bank in Australia.

It shares with the banking sector a 100%