Financial markets include any marketplace where securities are traded. This encompasses both official organized exchanges and unofficial over-the-counter (OTC) primary and secondary markets where securities such as foreign exchange, money instruments, stocks, bonds, derivatives and other assets are introduced and traded.

These markets are crucial to the efficient pricing, trading, and liquidity of the relevant assets. Problems arising in these markets whether small or more prevalent can have significant adverse economic effects to both financial, nominal and real variables of the overall economy and can lead to recessions, rising unemployment, unexpected changes in the inflation rate, misallocation of factors of production, investment capital and a deteriorating economic prosperity.

The section titled “Financial Markets” of the journal “Forum for Economic and Financial Studies (FEFS)” aims to publish original, state-of-the-art, and innovative research in this subject theme. This research covers all areas associated with the empirical and theoretical issues involved with the trading, pricing, forecasting, regulating and engineering of financial securities.

The scope of the section includes both the individual assets and the organized or over-the-counter markets as a whole, where these securities are traded in, along with their interactions with other markets, individual assets and microeconomic or macroeconomic variables.

Topics include portfolio optimization, asset and portfolio management, asset pricing, forecasting and trading, investment, market microstructure and their impacts on the stability and functioning of securities markets and financial intermediaries such as banks, quasi banks, investment and hedge funds, insurance markets, etc. 

The aim is to build a community of authors and readers to produce and discuss the latest research and develop new ideas and research directions. The contributors and readers of the section can be from any area of academia, the government, regulatory authorities, and market practitioners.

The submitted papers can be full or letter-style manuscripts, including empirical and theoretical works and literature review articles.

Finance; Financial markets; Financial instruments; Organized exchanges; Over-the counter-exchanges;Assets and securities; Money markets; Capital markets; Pricing; Financial market spillovers; Efficient market hypothesis; Stocks; Bonds; Foreign exchange; Derivatives; Portfolio management; Banking; Investment; Econometrics; Artificial intelligence; Machine learning