Preface

This book focuses on some interesting topics in finance, including portfolio and investment strategies. It contains nine chapters from different finance and investment perspectives from authors across the globe. This book is organized into the following sections: "Investment and Portfolio Strategies," "Behavioral Finance and Investment Decisions," and "Emerging New Trends in Finance." The target audience comprises researchers, scholars, and specialists in the field of finance.

The first section, "Investment and Portfolio Strategies," includes three chapters. In Chapter 1, "Implementation of a Value-Oriented Strategy of the Organization through a Portfolio of Projects", Valentyna Molokanova describes the methodological aspects of implementing the organization's strategy through project portfolio management and analyses the existing concepts, models, and methods of organizational development portfolios management. In Chapter 2, "Estimating Short-Term Returns with Volatilities for High Frequency Stock Trades in Emerging Economies Using Gaussian Processes (GPs)" Leonard Mushunje, Maxwell Mashasha and Edina Chandiwana examine the volatility and stock prices and returns with some engineering and analytic tools to find the most optimal values for the stock price and return. In Chapter 3, "Firm-specific News and Anomalies", Hoang Van Hai, Phan Kim Tuan and Le The Phiet investigate the relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and future returns around firm-specific news announcements and examine whether systematic risk affects news and non-news idiosyncratic volatility profits.

The second section, "Behavioral Finance and Investment Decisions," includes two chapters. In Chapter 4, "Financial Literacy as a Tool for Stimulating the Investment Behaviour of Rural Women: An Empirical Assessment" Rajan Bhaskaran et al. examines the influence of financial awareness on the saving and investment behavior of rural females. In Chapter 5, "Accounting Information Quality and Investment Decisions" Nouha Khoufi examines the relationship between the quality of information and investment decisions, which helps to reduce information asymmetry and improve investment efficiency.

The third section, "Emerging New Trends in Finance," includes four chapters. In Chapter 6, "Digital Transformation of World Finance," Darina Saxunova and Corlise Liesl Le Roux investigate the transformation process of finance from a global view. In Chapter 7, "The Trouble with Minding Markets: Emotional Finance in Context", D'Maris Coffman examines the main theoretical claims of emotional finance and discusses the nature of financial assets and asset price bubbles, phantastic, and groupfeel subjects. In Chapter 8, "From Money-Centered to People- and Planet-Centered Ledger Economics: Leveraging the Hidden Wealth of Underutilized Productive Capacity" Thomas Fisher and Joel Hodroff proposes a framework to deal with wasted wealth, which consists of a new asset-management strategy that challenges the current money-centered approach to economics. Finally, In Chapter 9, "Tunisian Fintech: An Ecosystem under Construction - Can COVID 19 be the Fuel to Ignite the Construction of Tunisian Fintech?" Salma Zone examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the fintech industry and describes its future challenges.

We would like to express our cordial gratitude to all the authors for their contributions. The successful completion of this book has been the cooperation of many people, and we would like to thank Ms. Kristina Kardum Cvitan, Author Service Manager Ms. Ana Simcic, and Mr. Luka Cvjetkovic for their support during the publishing process.

### **Reza Gharoie Ahangar**

G. Brint Ryan College of Business, University of North Texas, USA

### **Asma Salman**

Professor of Finance, College of Business Administration, American University in the Emirates, UAE Section 1

Investment and Portfolio Strategies

### **Chapter 1**
