Companies use different methods and techniques to transfer taxable profits to tax havens. The paper aims at analysing the influence of the relocation of the registered office of Slovak companies in tax havens in relation to the leverage ratio and the ratio of debt per sales and to verify the use of debt by Slovak firms in the transfer of profits. In evaluating these indicators, we chose two approaches. We first analysed the change of indicators only for those firms that transferred their seat to lower tax jurisdiction. The analysis is complemented by a different view, when the selected indicators are compared to a group of businesses with a link to tax havens and with no link to tax havens. Our empirical results clearly indicate the tendency that firms in Slovakia benefit from the possibility of transferring profits to lower tax jurisdictions via debt channels. The median values of debt ratio after the transfer of the registered office to tax havens increased by 7.8%. The median value of the tracking indicator is 1.2 times higher for firms with tax haven links than for companies without links to tax havens.

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Any task of portfolio creation requires that a suitable pre-selection of assets is made, out of which the resultant portfolio is to be formed. Several approaches in passive investing implemented through portfolio tracking are applied in practice, and assets are pre-selected frequently on the basis of their capitalization or value/growth potential. The paper studies to which extent the investment style practiced by a small investor affects the performance of the tracking portfolio. The design of the analysis is experimental and hinges on tracking the S & P 500 Index in three different periods with assets pre-selected by diverse investment styles. Taking the approach of with linear and quadratic tracking, two factors are analyzed on that occasion: the investment style (big vs. small market capitalization, value vs. growth assets, Fama-French stratas of assets) and the number of assets (10, 20, 30, 40, 50 assets). It is found that while small market capitalization portfolios were preferable in the first two parts of the investigated time frame, this pattern ceased to hold in the third last part with no guidance for a recommendable investment style.

The paper is motivated by the fact that rebalancing in portfolio management has an effect recognisable with both return and risk, although its purported ambition is to control (or decrease) portfolio risk. Focusing upon rebalancing strategies in quadratic tracking, the paper investigates whether rebalancing contributes to higher returns or lower risks. The investigation is conducted as a case study of tracking the S&P 500 Index by means of its constituents in four different time periods spanning from 2011 to 2017. Different approaches to stock pre‑selection (according to investment styles induced by market capitalization and the P/B ratio), portfolio nominal sizes (ranging between 10 and 30 stocks) and rebalancing (including periodic, deviation or no rebalancing at all) are considered. The results suggest that the effect of rebalancing is generally more apparent with return and less with risk, and that risk may in times of turbulent markets be aggravated by rebalancing interventions.

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