Momentum in Stock Returns: Analysis for European Countries

This thesis investigates one of the most pervasive anomalies in the behaviour of stock returns, the momentum. We analyse whether there is momentum in European stock returns that would generate profitable investment strategies. First, we compute the average monthly returns on strategies built in accordance with the existing literature. Next, we compare returns on momentum strate- gies between markets with different levels of capitalization and development. Further, we test whether these returns can be explained as the compensation for risk exposures through the Capital Asset Pricing Model. We find that even though the underlying risk has perceptible predictive power for stock re- turns, there still remains a substantial part of abnormal returns unexplained by this model. Therefore, we extend it with additional explanatory variables that might have a predictive power for stock returns according to the Fama & French (1993) three-factor model and Fama & French (2015) five-factor model. We find that stocks that performed best over the short-term past tend to con- tinue to outperform other stocks and stocks that performed worst tend to have one of the lowest returns in subsequent months. We find that strategies based on buying past winners yield statistically significant positive abnormal returns. Furthermore,..