England, as well as CFA and ERP professional designations. In addition to academic appointments, Alexandr has held risk management positions at the National Bank of Uzbekistan. He is an active member of a number of professional and research associations.His research expertise is in the areas of emerging market finance, energy and carbon markets, local government finance, and financial education. As an educator focusing on evidence-based solutions to practical educational problems, Dr Akimov has been the recipient of a number of university citations for excellence in teaching.

This paper documents evidence of reversals in the long-term returns of international equity markets. We use recent short-term performance to better select contrarian securities that appear ready to reverse. Our late-stage contrarian strategy consistently provides stronger evidence of long-term return reversal than does the traditional pure contrarian strategy when applied to developed and emerging market indices. Despite an absence of cross-sectional contrarian profits for developed markets in our post-1989 subsample, longitudinal analysis provides strong evidence of reversals during this period. Overall, our results suggest that the reversal of long-term returns may be stronger and more pervasive than is generally understood.

Purpose -Malkiel and Xu state that idiosyncratic volatility is highly correlated with size and that it plays a powerful role in explaining expected returns. The purpose of this paper is to ask whether idiosyncratic volatility is useful in explaining the variation in expected returns; and whether the findings can be explained by the turn of the year effect. Design/methodology/design -Monthly stock returns and market values of all listed firms in Germany and UK covering the period 1991-2001 from Datastream are used as the basis of the evaluation. Findings -The paper finds that the three-factor model provides a better description of expected returns than the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). That is, it is found that firm size and idiosyncratic volatility are related to security returns. In addition, it is noted that the findings are robust throughout the sample period Originality/value -The paper shows that the CAPM beta alone is not sufficient to explain the variation in stock returns.

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Existing research shows that a strategy based on the 52-week high prices of individual stocks explains momentum and is able to forecast returns. Given that the momentum strategy based on international market indices is also known to be profitable, we investigate the profitability of the 52-week high strategy for both developed and emerging market indices. In each case, we find that the momentum strategy is significantly more profitable than the corresponding 52-week high strategy. In general, our results indicate that the 52-week high effect is not as reliable or as robust as the momentum effect.52-week high momentum, index returns, developed markets, emerging markets,