I am in my final year at university and this semester will have to complete a 20 credit ‘Research Project’. Essentially it is a concise, formal report. I need to have a title by Friday 15th February.
I have been brainstorming ideas and wanted to see what people thought of a few titles I have come up with. I am hoping to base my project on Finance/Investing related ideas, and I know many people here also have a big interest in these areas, and are a lot older and wiser than me, so any advice is appreciated. These titles are not final and more ideas at this point!
- Does the introduction of zero-commission brokers (and index funds) allow retail investors to participate more effectively in the stock market?
- Does Chinese company’s use of Creative Accounting make investing in China inherently more risky?
- Efficient Market Hypothesis: Does it work in reality?
- Behavioral factors affecting Investment decision making in the Stock Market?
Other ideas I have revolve around; High Frequency Trading and flash crashes, portfolio allocation between bonds and equities, looking into ISAs and how effective they are.
Realistically, I am looking for a title that interests me, but also has substantial data/journals/statistics on, to provide a thorough report.
Sorry, I appreciate this post is a bit random. But any help is greatly appreciated!
Ryan
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It’s very cool to see you’re basing your project on this kind of thing 
Just a couple of small comments.
The ‘effectively’ is a little bit ambiguous, do you mean that it makes the stock market more accessible &/or that it enables better returns or something else? It might be worth breaking that down a bit.
There’s been quite a lot of study on this already. On the one hand that means there’s lots of sources to refer to but on the other, it might make it hard to come up with some unique insights.
This is really interesting area in my opinion, particularly because of the potential repercussions if there was a credit crunch in China. Their system of shadow banking (questionable lending practises) & the close relationship between the state & private corporations are related topics that could be worth looking into.
The overarching question for me is: is the Chinese economy as stable as it seems - can we trust that these corporations are built on a solid foundation & won’t collapse? I’d probably choose to study this topic 
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Thanks for your response Alex 
I see where you are coming from - yeah, accessible would be a better word. What I was trying to get at with that title was whether Robinhood/Freetrade are breaking down barriers between the ‘professionals’ and retail investors. This ‘barrier’ was first broken down when Index Investing with low fees was introduced. But has it been broken down, even further, because of zero-commission brokers? Although, I guess it would be quite difficult to get much data on this!
A very good point! I agree that it would be difficult to think of a new approach to EMH, or improve what is already out there.
Thanks for these points - very helpful! This probably is my favourite title at the moment, although I haven’t got to decide until the end of next week. I could look at having a broader title maybe? Such as the stability of the Chinese economy, and then go into detail about the close relationship between the private-public sector, creative accounting, mention the current trade war, and so on.
Thanks for the feedback Alex, I appreciate it! 
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