Spyros Papathanasiou

The Day of the Week Effect Patterns on Stock Market Return and Volatility: Evidence for the Athens Stock Exchange

This paper investigates the day of the week effect in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) General Index over a ten year period divided into two subperiods: 1995-2000 and 2001-2004. Five major indices are also considered: Banking, Insurance, and Miscellaneous for the first subperiod, and FTSE-20 and FTSE-40 for the second subperiod. Using a conditional variance framework, which extends previous work on the Greek stock market, we test for possible existence of day of the week variation in both return and volatility equations. When using the GARCH (1,1) specification only for the return equation and the Modified-GARCH (1,1) specification for both the return and volatility equations, findings indicate that the day of the week effect is present for the examined indices of the emerging ASE over the period 1995-2000. However, this stock market anomaly seems to loose its strength and significance in the ASE over the period 2001-2004, which might be due to the Greek entry to the Euro-Zone and the market upgrade to the developed.

Initial performance of Greek IPOs, underwriter's reputation and oversubscription

This paper provides additional international evidence on the IPOs by examining the initial performance and two main determinants of short-run underpricing of 169 IPOs listed on the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) over the period 1997-2002. The initial performance of the IPOs is measured by calculated two formulas: the raw returns and the excess or adjusted returns of the first, fifth and twenty first day respectively. Furthermore, we use a proxy to rank the underwriters’ prestige along with the times of oversubscription, which are introduced as explanatory variables in our model. The results of the analysis provide evidence of significant underpricing. Furthermore, the cross sectional analysis on the determinants of the IPOs shows that both the underwriters’ prestige and the times of oversubscription significantly affect the underpricing level of the IPOs over the most important and “hot” period for the Greek emerging stock market since its establishment, in terms of growth rates, acceleration of the going public process and volatility of market and stock returns.

How Rewarding is Technical Analysis? Evidence from Athens Stock Exchange

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the performance of various technical trading rules in the Athens Stock Market. We test two of the simplest and most popular trading rules- Moving Averages and MACD Indicator. We evaluate how these simple forms of technical analysis can predict stock price movements in the Athens Stock Exchange. This study will investigate these effects for the most important index of the Athens market, the Athens General Index. Our study covers the period from 1/1/1990 to 31/12/2004. The methodologies employed include standard tests and bootstrap. Overall, our results provide strong support for the examined technical strategies.

Mutual funds in Greece: case study of domestic equity mutual funds during a financial crisis

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of Greek equity mutual funds for the period 2012-2016, analyzing further the selectivity and market timing ability, and short-term performance persistence for the period 2015-2016. Design/methodology/approach - Utilizing a survivorship-bias-controlled sample of 25 funds and daily data, the authors use single-index (Jensen, 1968) and multi-factor (Carhart, 1997) models to evaluate risk-adjusted returns using the General Index of Athens Stock Exchange as a benchmark. The Treynor-Mazuy (1966) and Henriksson-Merton (1981) models are used to assess the stock selection and market timing abilities of fund managers. In order to investigate short-term performance persistence, the authors implement a variety of parametric (Bollen and Busse, 2005) and nonparametric tests (Malkiel, 1995; Brown and Goetzmann, 1995; Kahn and Rudd, 1995). Findings - Results show that the funds underperformed the General Index, mainly due to the managers’ market timing inability. Furthermore, weak evidence for short-term performance persistence has been documented. Research limitations/implications - Checking for performance persistence, it was impossible to rank funds and form deciles according to their estimated abnormal returns, as in Bollen and Busse (2005), due to the small number of mutual funds operating in Greece. Originality/value - Empirical studies regarding the performance of Greek equity mutual funds are still limited. Therefore, this paper intends to fill this gap by providing further evidence of performance evaluation.