PurposeThis paper deals with the forecasting application of runs analysis based methods in the field of active investments' alpha. This study aims to use different models exploiting possible momentum and persistence in the active investments' returns, specifically in relation to the prominent field of their (possible) outperformance.Design/methodology/approachGathering a large set of managed assets from the US large-cap equity segment, this study examined a variety of simple and more complicated models, from unpretentious probability, to the full-scale runs analysis approach. These models were evaluated on monthly and yearly data, with simulation of their performance on 30 years period also carried out. The study then tested the results for significant differences, as well as separately evaluated them for individual types of investments and equity strategies (styles).FindingsSimpler forecasting methods provided generally more efficient outcomes. Choosing simply investments with the highest past alpha (simple strategy), highest ratio of positive alpha in the past (opportunistic strategy) or in the given stadium of the market cycle (market strategy) would result in a low relative error, while having limited data and computational requirements. The runs analysis itself performed less favorably, being on one hand quite successful in the alpha direction forecast, but subpar when it comes to average return.Originality/valueThe results also point to short-term persistence in surveyed investments performance, indicating a yearly interval as optimum for portfolio reallocation. Overall, this outcome implies the rehabilitation of technical analysis as a principal approach of estimating future performance, in the field of managed equity investments.

Abstract The biogeochemical niche hypothesis (BNH) proposes the multi-elemental composition of organisms — their elementome — as a new ecological dimension. However, which ecological factors shape elementome assembly remains little known, especially in animals. Here, we studied the mandibular elementome of two sympatric small mammals — Apodemus flavicollis and Clethrionomys glareolus — to assess how intraspecific variability (ontogenetic changes in body mass and sex under the vertebrate bone hypothesis; VBH) and environmental filtering (season and habitat) shape essential and non-essential elementome assembly. Species showed moderate elementome segregation and seasonal niche partitioning, with implications for coexistence. Ontogenetic body mass predicted elemental variation and calcium substitution, with several hypermetric scalings in autumn indicating strong departures from mass-invariant homeostasis. Finally, our results suggest a dichotomy: essential elementomes were mainly driven by intraspecific variation, whereas non-essential elementomes were rather shaped by environmental filtering. Our results position animal elementomes as an integrative ecological dimension linking organismal biology, species interactions, and environmental filtering across individuals, populations, and species. Open Research Statement The data and R code to reproduce the study are made publicly available in a Figshare repository (Montiel-Mora et al. 2026, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.33340470; URL: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.33340470 ).

This paper deals with the problem of how the risk perception among retail customers is affected by the consumer protection regulation on the financial market. Through a questionnaire survey, we have measured the effect of selected consumer protection measures on banking or investment decisions taken by a young (student) population. These measures included the most common elements of financial regulation, such as bank deposit insurance, corporate bond prospectus, licenced fund management and securities broker indemnity insurance. Our results show that protective state intervention represents strong stimuli for customer decision -making with a widely misleading effect. It overshadows other factors, including individual qualification, risk -reward preference and demographic attributes, all of which were found to be insignificant. Since the surveyed measures reached a similar level of effect yet they offer different substance, this outcome has important policymaking implications.

Abstrakt:Tento článek se zabývá ex post zhodnocením přesnosti plánování státního rozpočtu České republiky.Vycházeje ze dvoustupňové analýzy (plánovací odchylky a statistické testování) bylo zjištěno, že přestože výsledné odchylky v některých kapitolách rozpočtu jsou zaznamenáníhodné, pouze malá

This article deals with the interaction between commission remuneration of independent financial advisers and selected sales factors, including the quality of advice. Utilizing data on investment transactions and a linear model with mixed effects, we have found that the link between commission and quality of the subsequent recommendation is not homogeneous, and advice-bias potential is present only in a limited range of organizational environments, connected mainly to the flat-structure business model. On the other hand, arbitrage between different product classes was found to create a biasing potential across almost all types of firms, creating potential for market systemic risk. Finally, the effect of information provided was proved to be significant only to a very limited extent. © 2017 Academy of Financial Services.

This paper deals with the ongoing rise of index (passive) investing on the U.S. large-cap equity market and its manifestations. We have constituted two scenarios of the 1990–2021 market shift: implying the reduction of efficiency in the first and the continuous increase of efficiency in the second one. Analysing a wide array of 2 173 managed assets, we have found that passive investments´ returns significantly outmatch the active ones. Our results also indicate that active investments offered significantly reduced volatility and the risk-adjusted returns were free of significant differences. This implies no change of intrinsic market efficiency so far, along with overall support for the efficient market hypothesis in the target sample.

Nest boxes represent a popular tool to support secondary cavity-nesting species. Surprisingly, the benefits and limitations of nest boxes for target species in different environments are poorly understood. We performed a 3-years experimental study in two different Central European forests to evaluate nest box use and breeding performance of boreal owl ( Aegolius funereus ) — a species well known for its readiness to occupy nest boxes. Based on territorial vocalisation, two boreal owl populations 200 km apart were similarly abundant in their environments. However, only the boreal owl population in young restored Norway ( Picea abies ) and blue ( Picea pungens ) spruce-dominated forests on mountain plateaus readily occupied nest boxes with the occupancy reaching 8–15%. Nest boxes lost their supporting function for the boreal owl in mature Scots pine ( Pinus sylvestris )-dominated forests in the lowland, where the nest box occupancy reached 0–1%. As a result, the population of boreal owls that used nest boxes in the young restored forests produced 10 times more fledglings than the population inhabiting mature Scots pine forests. We explain the differences by the contrasting availability of natural tree cavities between the two study areas being much higher in mature Scots pine forests. For the first time, this study documents differences in nest box use despite similar food availability and population size of the target species. The study provides the findings-related recommendations for deploying nest boxes for boreal owls and points out a general lack of practical guides.

This paper deals with inflation forecasting and targeting performance of selected Central and Eastern-European central banks. Using battery of absolute and scaled forecasting errors along with significance tests, we have evaluated inflation predictions on the optimal monetary policy transmission horizon (14-16 months), as well as adherence to long-term inflation targets. Out of the evaluated Czech, Hungarian and Polish central banks, complemented by the European Central Bank for comparison, it was found, that even though the bank's performance improved during the last decade, notably with the forecasting component, some issues are still present. These are mostly connected to the inflation targeting mechanism, which was found to contain systemic bias in the case of the Czech national bank, as well as failing in comparison with the naive benchmark in the case of the European Central Bank. Both outcomes pave the way for further investigation in a wider economical context.

Due to mainly opportunistic hunting behaviour of Barn owl can be its diet composition used for assessing local structure of small-mammal community. We evaluated the structure of small-mammal communities in the Mediterranean region by analysing Barn owl diet using own pellets and literature data (85 localities comprising 182,343 prey individuals). Contrary to widely accepted macroecological theory, we found a latitudinal increase of small-mammal alpha diversity, a less distinct west–east increase and lower diversity on islands. The mean prey weight decreased with increasing latitude, while on islands it decreased with increasing island area. The mean prey weight on islands was further negatively affected by mean land modification by human and positively affected by its range. The diet diversity on islands was not affected either by island area or its distance from the mainland. Its composition largely conformed to the main pattern pronounced over whole the region: an unexpected homogeneity of small-mammal community structure. Despite high beta diversity and large between-sample variation in species composition, Crocidura (+ Suncus etruscus ) and murids ( Apodemus , Mus , Rattus , in marginal regions partly replaced by gerbillids, Meriones or Microtus ) composed more than 90% of owl prey in 92% of samples. Peak abundances of these widespread species are associated with a dynamic mosaic of dense patches of sparse herb vegetation and evergreen sclerophyllous shrublands interspersing areas of human activity, the dominant habitat of the inner Mediterranean and richest food resource for foraging Barn owls. The respective small-mammal species can be looked upon as invasive elements accompanying large scale human colonization of the region since the Neolithic and replacing original island biota. Our study documented that desertification of the Mediterranean played an important role in shaping inverse latitudinal gradient in diversity of small-mammals that contradicts to widely accepted mecroecological theory.

This paper deals with the effects of distribution stress and macroeconomic factors on the composition of life insurance investment portfolios on the Central European market. Using a wide array of variables and the VAR model as our main method, we have found that a strong majority of insurers react to external shocks, induced by high levels of contract turnover or positive changes in macro-variables such as GDP and inflation, by strengthening bond components of their portfolio. The exception is connected to interest rates (two-week repo), which presumably have a negative effect on bond investments. Other components such as shares, funds and cash positions have been affected in a diverse way, yet to a minor extent. This implies that insurers tend to react to external stressors by beefing up the conservative part of their investments, potentially leading to an underperformance of managed assets. As such, our results point to conceivable regulatory implications, which would prevent those secondary negative detriments of life distribution growth (i.e., reselling), which are to be expected on the surveyed market.

This paper deals with the effects of distribution stress and macroeconomic factors on the composition of life insurance investment portfolios on the Central European market. Using a wide array of variables and the VAR model as our main method, we have found that a strong majority of insurers react to external shocks, induced by high levels of contract turnover or positive changes in macro-variables such as GDP and inflation, by strengthening bond components of their portfolio. The exception is connected to interest rates (two-week repo), which presumably have a negative effect on bond investments. Other components such as shares, funds and cash positions have been affected in a diverse way, yet to a minor extent. This implies that insurers tend to react to external stressors by beefing up the conservative part of their investments, potentially leading to an underperformance of managed assets. As such, our results point to conceivable regulatory implications, which would prevent those secondary negative detriments of life distribution growth (i.e., reselling), which are to be expected on the surveyed market.

Vocal activity is one of the main attributes that enables assessment of the presence and abundance of animal populations. However, the factors affecting vocal activity are rarely studied, especially in owls. We studied the vocal activity of Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus) using acoustic monitoring in relation to environmental factors in Central Europe (Czech Republic), over an area of 100 km2. We analysed a total of 1,310 hours of sound recordings collected over two years (2015 and 2016) at the turn of March/April and April/May. The frequency of sampling points in which we recorded Boreal Owl vocalizations varied from 0.17 to 0.59 and was higher in the year of increased prey abundance (2015) and earlier in the breeding season (March/April). The duration of Boreal Owl vocal activity varied from 1 to 60 minutes per hour and was related to temporal factors. In particular, the duration of Boreal Owl vocalization increased late in the breeding season (April/May) and in the year of higher prey abundance (2015), and it showed two peaks of vocal activity during the night.

This paper deals with the issue of forecastability of sales activities of independent financial advisers (agents). Employing the most common quantitative methods on a diverse sample of timelines from multiple advisory companies, we have found that under most settings, these methods offer sub-par performance with high relative errors and no statistical differences between them. When a more granular approach is applied (reflecting sales unit size), ARIMA and the simple moving average emerge as significantly less accurate. This outcome is true for all sales units regardless of their size, when relative error is concerned. Thus, our analysis confirms the difficult forecastability of financial sales, speaking against the utilisation of more sophisticated forecasting methods, which mostly fail when compared to their much simpler and less costly counterparts.

Purpose This paper aims to deal with expert judgment and its predictive ability in the context of investment funds. The judgmental ratings awarder with a large set of experts was compared to a sample of the dynamic investment funds operating in Central and Eastern Europe with their objective performance, both past and future, relatively to the time of the forecast. Design/methodology/approach Data on the survey sample enabled the authors to evaluate both ex post judgmental validity, i.e. how the experts reflected the previous performance of funds, and ex ante predictive accuracy, i.e. how well their judgments estimated the future performance of the fund. For this purpose, logistic regression for past values estimations and linear model for future values estimations was used. Findings It was found that the experts (independent academicians, senior bank specialists and senior financial advisors) were only able to successfully reflect past annual returns of a five-year period, failing to reflect costs and annual volatility and, mainly, failing to predict any of the indicators on the same five-year horizon. Practical implications The outcomes of this paper confirm that expert judgment should be used with caution in the context of financial markets and mainly in situations when domain knowledge is applicable. Procedures incorporating judgmental evaluations, such as individual investment advice, should be thoroughly reviewed in terms of client value-added, to eliminate potential anchoring bias. Originality/value This paper sheds new light on the quality and nature of individual judgment produced by financial experts. These are prevalent in many situations influencing clients’ decision-making, be it financial advice or multiple product contests. As such, our findings underline the need of scepticism when these judgments are taken into account.

PurposeThis paper aims to deal with the conflict of interest in the area of investment advice, rewarded through the commission mechanism. Using a substantial data set on sales of independent agents, the authors have examined the relationship between the amount of commission paid to the agent and the subsequent performance of the client’s portfolio (annualised five-year returns, volatility and total expenses ratio).Design/methodology/approachThe main working method consisted of linear model with mixed effects. Processing total amount of 2,066 advised sales from, the authors were able to examine not only the general level of aforementioned relationship but also the effect of different organisational environments, ranging from multi-level marketing (MLM), pool to flat structures.FindingsContrary to general expectations, the authors have found that investment advisers do recommend products with generally higher costs and volatility, but in the MLM networks, they are at the same time able to generate significantly higher returns on recommended funds.Research limitations/implicationsDue to the setting of this study, the authors were only able to cover the vital period of 2007-2018, mostly the “good times” in the region’s economy. Such limitation represents guideline for further longitudinal research, which will be followed in the next analytical steps.Practical implicationsThe results are of interest both to policymakers and final consumers. The first group can better adjust rules in the inducements and advice area, to stimulate shift in different organisational environments. Clients, on the other hand, receive additional guidance on which types of companies generally offer the most beneficial advice.Originality/valueAlthough research on advice and conflict of interest is prevalent, the meta-analysis shows that only few authors were able to quantitatively disseminate the relationship between remuneration of advisor and subsequent utility of the client. The findings are unique in this regard, bringing statistically conclusive results from region of Central Europe, where advice represents one of the principal distribution channels.

The paper deals with the agent-principal problem (adverse selection) in the distribution of investment products. Utilising data from the Czech financial market, a linear model with mixed effects was constructed, evaluating the relationship between remuneration of individual agents and quality-costs of the products they recommend. The results were structured for different organisational setups. We have found that in some less important environments from the market perspective (small and medium multi-level marketing networks, small and big pools, medium and big flat firms), there is a negative association between quality-cost of the contracted product and the amount of commission paid out to the agent. This indicates potential consumer detriment. In the majority of organisations dominating the industry, however, the direction of this relationship is positive in nature or statistically insignificant. Hence, the systemic potential for instigating the adverse selection was not detected in a major part of the market, bringing up regulatory implications in the conflict of interest and inducements area.

This paper deals with the experience of third pillar reform in the Czech Republic, executed in 2013. The core of our study is formed by a comparative analysis of newly introduced supplementary pension savings and its substitute products (investment funds, life insurance) from two main aspects: product features and distribution features. The outcomes are supported by empirical sales and population penetration of the surveyed products. The results indicate that even a pension product with a very attractive product design, such as supplementary pension savings, will be hampered by its substitutes as long as its distribution features are unattractive. This is an important lesson, particularly for the discussed European solution, the pan-European portable pension product (PEPP).

Příspěvek pojednává o negativních dopadech některých aspektů státní regulace (regulatorní arbitráž, relativní pře-regulace a pod-regulace) na chování ekonomických aktérů v rámci distribuce finančních produktů. Prostřednictvím tří případových (životní pojištění, neveřejné nabídky dluhopisů, penzijní spoření) jsou ilustrovány případy, kdy státní zásahy určitého typu vedly k deformaci fungování cílového trhu a k celkově negativnímu dopadu na koncové zákazníky. Jakkoliv nelze popřít dílčí selhání i na straně regulovaného trhu jako takového, provedená pozorování ukazují, že zejména regulatorní arbitráž mezi jednotlivými sektory finanční industrie je významným stimulátorem distribuční aktivity, která může být do budoucna zdrojem systémového rizika pro celý trh.