The construction of Investment Portfolios in the Iraq Stock Exchange: Market Timing Vs. an Efficient Selection

Abstract

Abstract

         Uncertainty, the deeply-rooted fact that surrounding the investment environment, especially the stock market which just prices have taken a specific trend until they moved to another one for its up or down. This means that the volatility characteristic of financial market requires the rational investor an argument led towards the adoption of planned acts to gain greater benefit in the goal of wealth maximizing. There is no possibility to achieve this goal without the burden of uncertainty and the risk of systematic fluctuations of investment returns in the financial market after the facts of  efficient diversification have proved the removal possibility of unsystematic fluctuations in stock returns. As long as the investor has ambition since his first nature questing to maximize the benefit of his limited resources, he has no way but to try to ease that volatility and restrain it to the extent that it guarantees to achieve acceptable returns on the acquisition of shares as a compensation for bearing the risk of investment. Perhaps the investor has an options that appear in the form of an efficient portfolio construction or market timing in accordance with its ups and downs and what could be resulted from those options on the performance of the portfolio.

         The Iraqi investor may face in the Iraq market Exchange the same problem to be the cause of a motivation to make a trade-off between the market timing and an efficient portfolio in light of the Iraqi financial market conditions. Accordingly, this problem has been tested in the Iraq market Exchange, including the listed companies which have stocks traded at its seven economic sectors maintained a continuation of the traded regularly for the duration of the research were the monthly returns being used between the years (2008-2009) for the construction of investment portfolios and measure their performance using the Treynor Index. The (Fabozzi & Francis, 1977) model was used to determine market trends in terms of the rise and fall and then to build equity portfolios according to market timing, and the (Simple Ranking Model, 1976) for the construction of an efficient selected portfolio. Among the several conclusions that were reached was the fall in market timing performance of the portfolio compared to the portfolio of an efficient selection. This suggests the difficulty of timing the Iraq market Exchange as far as the time frame covered by the research, and therefore need to heed the efficient selection of the components of the portfolio that the testing results  have proven high levels of performance in light of market volatility in both directions upward and downward , and in a manner which is consistent with what is the prevailing prepositions in the financial thought that ensure the efficient portfolio for the investor to achieve the best trade-off between risk and return, especially when there is a valid trade-off between them with no longer need to decrease the risk of the portfolio to the lowest levels.