Kumulacja ryzyka na rynkach finansowych jako zagrożenie równowagi rynkowej

The aim of this paper is to present that althrough risk-aversion is considered as a highly known phenomenon, in emotional situations people tend to put at risk surprisingly much more assets of theirs than one may even expect. In emotionally overwhelming circumstances entities act as if they are guided by unusual or untypical preferences. What disproves the commonness of risk aversion are analogical behaviours of stock exchange players in financial markets and compulsive gamblers in everyday life. Over the last years a crucial role in the financial markets has beeen played by hedge funds. Methods commonly used and focused on the most aggressive and risky investments are speculation as well as leverage. Moreover, the futures exchange, which despite its noble and highly sophisticated assumptions triggered the process of trade in the pure risk, is developing. That is a natural reaction to the fact that nowadays the more common subject matter of futures contracts are not necessarily natural resources, currencies or stock exchange assets but rather debts themselves. More and more frequently the rational trade on the stock exchange gives its way to a speculative game, which may become a serious threat to the market equilibrium. There is a possibility of quantitively measuring the exchange players’ risk attidudes by introducing the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of absolute risk aversion (riskiness), which may be helpful at defining the real investors’ spirits and a potential speculative bubble effect. Traditional predictive methods, which exclude investors’ spirits and their risk attitudes, might be successful in terms of analysing past and future market trends as well as of making them applicable to the foreseeble future. Nevertheless, in respect of predicting a sudden market crash, techniques mentioned above - to a large extent - are rather useless. The analysis of Arrow-Pratt measures of absolute risk aversion (ARA) may provide theoretical as well as practical backgrounds to bridge the gap in the empirical data.