Financial risk hedging in PSI 20 listed companies

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the financial risk hedging in Portuguese Stock Index (PSI) 20 listed companies. To this propose, we have reviewed the individual and consolidated account reports of the respective companies, analyzing the period between 2008 and 2012.
Regarding financial risks we identified the following in PSI 20 firms: credit risk, currency risk, interest rate risk, liquidity and price risk. As counter measures we found that these firms use as hedge the instruments that best suits their needs. In this aspect no preference on any particular hedging instrument was found, except in the case of swaps and forwards products, as hedge for currency risk and interest rates.