The International Guide To Securities Market Indices

Originally published in 1996, The International Guide to Securities Market Indices provides a comprehensive overview of the securities market indices and offers assistance to professionals as well as individual investors in the selection of an appropriate securities market index, on a worldwide basis. The Guide’s identifies and catalogues available performance indicators along with their publishers and describes their relevant characteristics and a perspective on their historical price and total return performance. It also contains descriptive profiles along with historical performance data on 400 of the world’s leading global, regional and local securities market indices and sub-indices covering 10 asset classes.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Global securities trading has arrived: already hundreds of stocks are traded internationally, and thousands of securities houses work in foreign exchanges. Few companies know this burgeoning international market like the accounting firm of Spicer and Oppenheim. They specialize in the securities field in over 200 offices and affiliates world-wide. Now their expertise is available in an easy-to-use reference book. The Spicer and Oppenheim Guide to Securities Markets Around the World is a desktop guide that will help you determine the feasibility and profitability of trading in 25 major international centres. It gives instant access to concise background information on each exchange, its size, markets for bonds and equities, market characteristics, futures and options, regulations affecting the exchange, tax considerations, and prospective developments.

Using newly-constructed data covering the last decade, we document that, in most of forty markets, when added to the main index, firms’ returns experience an increase in comovement with the rest of the index, reflected in higher beta and greater explanatory power of the market return. Stock turnover and analyst coverage also typically increase upon inclusion. Using various tests, we find the demand-based view of comovement (the category/habitat theories of Barberis, Shleifer and Wurgler, 2005) to provide a good explanation for many of our findings. Some results, though, suggest that information-related factors are also important in explaining the increased comovement.

This book presents the economic foundation of international equity investments providing a practical guide to invest in international equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It shows how to gain exposure to foreign stock markets through both theoretical foundations of international diversification and in-depth characteristics of global, regional, country-specific, and international sector/thematic ETFs. Unlike other books in the field which broadly discuss different aspects of the ETF market, this book explores one specific market segment, offering the first in-depth and state-of-the-art analysis of international equity ETFs and including, in particular, ETFs with global, regional, single-country, and international sector/thematic exposures. The number and variety of such financial instruments are constantly growing. Hence, it seems obvious that there is an urgent need for a book that will help investors who are willing to diversify their portfolios outside the domestic market—in both developed and emerging/frontier markets. International Equity Exchange-Traded Funds presents a comprehensive review of investment possibilities offered by international ETFs for stock market investors.