Assignment 6

Team 1
Thomas de Vries 334208 40 hours spent
Raphael Spaans 348823 40 hours spent
Bart-Floris Lensink 358102 40 hours spent

Date of submission: May 6th, 2014

“This document is written by Thomas de Vries, Raphael Spaans, and Bart-Floris Lensink, who declare that each individual takes responsibility for the full contents of the whole document. We declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no sources other than mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. RSM is only responsible for supervision of completion of the work but not for the contents.”

Table of content Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Theory 5 Current study 7 Effect sizes and confidence intervals 7 Research strategy 8 Populations and measurements 8 Populations 8 Practical relevance of the effect sizes 11 Critical Synthesis 13 Selection of studies 13 Critical evaluation of studies 13 Results and Discussion 14 An attempt at best practice 19 Introduction 19 Methods 19 Research strategy 19 Independent variable 19 Dependent variable 20 Results 21 Control variables 22 Worst case analysis 24 Discussion 24 Appendices 26 Appendix A 26 Appendix B 30 References 31 Sources for data of our control variables 31 Websites 31 Lectures and sheets 31 Scientific articles 31

Abstract
The crisis at the end of the last decade made us think about the financial markets and if we could have been able to foresee this crisis. There are numerous theories about this phenomenon, including ones that say we could have been able to predict that the markets were about to collapse. Our thesis is focused at the predictive power of investor sentiment, something that might have been a good indicator of the drop in the markets.
We start with a critical synthesis about what previous research