CMU-Q senior student Abdulla Al-Hemaidi secured first place in the Qatar Finance and Business Academy (QFBA) Finance Research Award competition. The winning paper, which is based on Al-Hemaidi’s honors thesis, was jointly advised by professors Serkan Akgüç and Veli Safak. CMU-Q is a Qatar Foundation partner university.
The research utilized text-analytics methods to evaluate official company announcements from the Qatar Stock Exchange. Al-Hemaidi’s analysis demonstrated that equity prices respond slowly to emotional markers within these corporate disclosures. By applying these findings, he developed a trading strategy that generated an 11.8% annualized return between 2010 and 2024. This performance outperformed the QE Index by approximately 500% over the same 14-year period.
Al-Hemaidi successfully defended his thesis, earning College Honors. He graduates with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a minor in economics, a concentration in finance, and University Honors. In a complementary analysis within his thesis, he also explored out-of-sample trading strategies based on nonlinear models of historical prices, which produced substantial annualized returns of up to 153 percent relative to a near-zero buy-and-hold benchmark in the Qatar Stock Exchange, further highlighting the potential for systematic inefficiencies in the local equity market.
