Force-Majeure Events and Financial Market’s Behavior

Abstract

Efficient market hypothesis fails from time to time. There are many reasons why it happens. We will try to concentrate on one of them – force-majeure events – situations when something important happens unexpectedly. In this case market simply can’t absorb information in one moment. So for some period of time it becomes inefficient and stays inefficient until new information will not be included by the market. Such situations give us possibility to predict the market’s behavior. This is our intuitive assumption. To confirm or refuse it we will analyze the reaction of financial markets to the biggest force-majeure events during last 20 years. Also we will try to develop a trading strategy based on financial market’s reaction to force- majeure events.

Keywords: financial market, force-majeure event, financial market’s efficiency, events study

JEL Classification: G14, G15, G17