SSRN Viewer

We provide a framework for using conditioning information in the process of global asset allocation. While we discuss strategies in a global setting, the same reasoning can be applied to other asset allocation programs with different investment objectives. We examine three levels of asset allocation: unconditional or benchmark allocation, strategic asset allocation, and tactical asset allocation. We show how to use conditioning information in the process of global tactical asset allocation. An important lesson emerges. There is considerable work documenting predictability of returns using past information variables. Many of these variables are related to the stage of the business cycle, and suggest that much of the predictability in these assets, or markets, are common. The fact that returns are predictable means that active asset allocation strategies can outperform passive strategies. Uncovering the predictability is challenging as it but allows managers to beat traditional benchmarks.

This article expands upon “Toward Maximum Diversification” by Choueifaty and Coignard [2008]. We present new mathematical properties of the Diversification Ratio and Most Diversified Portfolio (MDP), and investigate the optimality of the MDP in a mean-variance framework. We also introduce a set of “Portfolio Invariance Properties,” providing the basic rules an unbiased portfolio construction process should respect. The MDP is then compared in light of these rules to popular methodologies (equal weights, equal risk contribution, minimum variance), and their performance is investigated over the past decade, using the MSCI World as reference universe. We believe that the results obtained in this article show that the MDP is a strong candidate for being the un-diversifiable portfolio, and as such delivers investors with the full benefit of the equity premium.

This paper follows Keller (2012), which introduced the Flexible Asset Allocation (FAA) concept. FAA is based on a weighted ranking score of historical asset returns (R), volatilities (V), and correlations to an equal weighted index (C). We call this “generalized momentum” since we assume persistence in the short-term, not only for R, but also for V and C. Portfolios were formed monthly from a specified quantile of assets with the highest combined score. In this paper we generalize FAA, starting from a tactical version of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) proposed in Keller (2013). Instead of choosing assets in the portfolio by a weighted ordinal rank on R, V, and C as in FAA, our new methodology – called Elastic Asset Allocation (EAA) – uses a geometrical weighted average of the historical returns, volatilities and correlations, using elasticities as weights. In order to avoid datasnooping (or curvefitting), we optimize the EAA model exclusively during a 50-year in-sample period (IS) from 1914 and apply these optimal IS parameters to test the model during an out-of-sample (OS) period from 1964-2014. The EAA model demonstrates impressive risk-adjusted and absolute OS performance over an equal weighted index for a variety of global asset universes.

Our paper examines two potential proxies for investor sentiment - the closed end fund discount (CEFD) and consumer confidence (CC). We can validate these proxies against a recently available more direct proxy for investor sentiment from UBS/Gallup. We find that the CEFD has no correlation with the UBS/Gallup survey, while the consumer confidence index does. The latter correlation would likely not be observed if either the consumer confidence index or the UBS/Gallup survey were not measures of some form of generic sentiment. This direct validation is not dependent on a price role for sentiment in financial markets. Going further, our paper finds that only consumer confidence but not the closed-end fund discount plays a robust role in financial market pricing. Changes in consumer confidence can explain the excess returns on small decile stocks. The pathway does not seem to operate only through the real underlying economy (consumption and corporate profits), and it is unaffected by controlling for a measure of CEO confidence changes. Our evidence satisfies a necessary condition for a behavioral perspective (DeLong/Shleifer/Summers/Waldmann 1990), but it is not a sufficient condition. Absent quantitative predictions by either the behavioral or the classical perspective about the exact influence of sentiment/confidence, empirical evidence cannot reject either.

We address the tendency of many investors to overestimate the rewards and underestimate the risks of investing in stocks over the long term - that is, investors' irrational optimism. In particular, we examine the widely held belief that stocks are a "safe" investment for the long run. The probability of experiencing a real loss on equities depends on the expected real return and standard deviation of stocks. Judgments about the future magnitude of these two parameters typically involve extrapolating from history. We use a global database of real equity returns from 16 countries during the 103-year period from 1900 through 2002 to confront the optimism of investors with the reality of history. Since 1900, the worldwide real return on equities averaged close to 5 percent a year (before costs, fees, and taxes). This is appreciably lower than is frequently quoted from historical averages, a difference that arises because we use a longer time frame than other studies and adopt a global focus. Prior views on the long-run safety of equities have been overly influenced by the experience of the United States. Furthermore, the US evidence that, over the long haul, stocks have beaten inflation over all 20-year periods is based on relatively few nonoverlapping observations and is hence subject to large sampling error. To counteract this dependency on projections of the US experience, we examine the histories of other countries. We find only three non-US equity markets (with a fourth on the borderline) that never experienced a shortfall in real returns over a 20-year period. The worst 20-year real returns of 11 countries were negative. Historically, in 6 of the 16 countries, investors would need to have waited more than 50 years to be assured of a positive return. We also analyze the future shortfall risk of an equity portfolio. The base case for the projections is a worldwide historical volatility level of 20 percent and mean real return of 5 percent, and we also examine a lower return of 4 percent. The projected shortfall risk exceeds the historical risk of shortfall - partly because of the lower assumed real returns, and partly because, even though volatility was projected to be the same as in the past, the shortfall analysis focuses on the full range of possible future returns rather than a single historical outcome. By construction, historical returns converged on long-term realized performance, but the forward-looking analysis shows that there is always risk from investing in volatile securities. Although the probable rewards from equity investment are attractive, stocks did not and cannot offer a guaranteed superior performance over the investment horizon of most investors. Furthermore, their prospective returns are lower than many investors project, whereas their risk is higher than many investors appreciate. Investors who assume that favorable equity returns can be relied on in the long term or that stocks are safe so long as they are held for 20 years are optimists. Their optimism is irrational.

These are my Lecture Notes for a course in Discrete Time Finance which I taught in the Winter term 2005 at the University of Leeds. I am aware that the notes are not yet free of error and the manuscrip needs further improvement. I am happy about any comment on the notes. Please send your comments via e-mail to ce16@st-andrews.ac.uk.

A large number of quantitative hedge funds have historically sustained losses. In this study we argue that the backtesting methodology at the core of their strategy selection process may have played a role. * Most firms and portfolio managers rely on backtests (or historical simulations of performance) to allocate capital to investment strategies. * After trying only 7 strategy configurations, a researcher is expected to identify at least one 2-year long backtest with an annualized Sharpe ratio of over 1, when the expected out of sample Sharpe ratio is 0. * If the researcher tries a large enough number of strategy configurations, a backtest can always be fit to any desired performance for a fixed sample length. Thus, there is a minimum backtest length (MinBTL) that should be required for a given number of trials. * Standard statistical techniques designed to prevent regression over-fitting, such as hold-out, are inaccurate in the context of backtest evaluation. * The practical totality of published backtests do not report the number of trials involved. * Under memory effects, over-fitting leads to systematic losses, not noise.

This essay first describes the differences in the ownership structure of companies in the three main economies of continental Europe - Germany, France, and Italy - with comparisons to the United States and the United Kingdom. Next, it summarizes the corporate governance issues that arise in firms with a dominant shareholder. Then, it provides a brief account of the major European corporate scandal, Parmalat, as an extreme example of investor expropriation in a family-controlled corporation. After outlining in general the legal tools that can be used to tackle abuses by controlling shareholders (internal governance mechanisms, shareholder empowerment, disclosure, public enforcement), it describes the corporate governance reforms enacted by France, Germany, and Italy between 1991 and 2005 and assesses the way in which investor protection in the three countries has changed.

We use high-frequency data from the Nasdaq exchange to build a measure of volume imbalance in the limit order book (LOB). We show that our measure is a good predictor of the sign of the next market order (MO), i.e. buy or sell, and also helps to predict price changes immediately after the arrival of an MO. Based on these empirical findings, we introduce and calibrate a Markov chain modulated pure jump model of price, spread, LO and MO arrivals, and volume imbalance. As an application of the model, we pose and solve a stochastic control problem for an agent who maximizes terminal wealth, subject to inventory penalties, by executing trades using LOs. We use in-sample-data (January to June 2014) to calibrate the model to ten equities traded in the Nasdaq exchange, and use out-of-sample data (July to December 2014) to test the performance of the strategy. We show that introducing our volume imbalance measure into the optimization problem considerably boosts the profits of the strategy. Profits increase because employing our imbalance measure reduces adverse selection costs and positions LOs in the book to take advantage of favorable price movements.

The correlation structure of the world equity markets varies considerably over the past 150 years. We show that correlations were high during periods of economic and financial integration. We decompose the benefits of international diversification into two parts: a component that measures variation of the average correlation across markets, and a component that measures variation of the investment opportunity set. Globalization is associated with relatively high correlations, and an increase in the investment opportunity set. From this, we infer that periods of globalization have both benefits and drawbacks for international investors.

Statistical arbitrage exploits temporal price differences between similar assets. We develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for statistical arbitrage and a novel data driven solution. First, we construct arbitrage portfolios of similar assets as residual portfolios from conditional latent asset pricing factors. Second, we extract their time series signals with a powerful machine-learning time-series solution, a convolutional transformer. Lastly, we use these signals to form an optimal trading policy, that maximizes risk-adjusted returns under constraints. Our comprehensive empirical study on daily US equities shows a high compensation for arbitrageurs to enforce the law of one price. Our arbitrage strategies obtain consistently high out-of-sample mean returns and Sharpe ratios, and substantially outperform all benchmark approaches.

The ongoing economic crisis has profoundly changed the industry of the asset management, by putting risk management at the heart of most investment processes. This new risk-based investment style does not rely on returns forecasts and is therefore assumed to be more robust. In 2011, it has particularly encountered a great success with the achievement of minimum variance, ERC and risk parity strategies in portfolios of several large institutional investors. These portfolio constructions are special cases of a more general class of allocation models, known as the risk budgeting approach. In a risk budgeting portfolio, the risk contribution from each components is equal to the budget of risk defined by the portfolio manager. Unfortunately, even if risk budgeting techniques are widely used by market practitioners, they are few results about the behavior of such portfolios in the academic literature. In this paper, we derive the theoretical properties of the risk budgeting portfolio and show that its volatility is located between those of minimum variance and weight budgeting portfolios. We also discuss the existence, uniqueness and optimality of such a portfolio. In a second part of the paper, we propose several applications of risk budgeting techniques for risk-based allocation, like risk parity funds and strategic asset allocation, and equity and bond alternative indexations.

Exotic interest rate derivatives are hard to value. Care must be taken to make sure that sources of volatility that impact the contingent claim are properly modeled, and that appropriate relationships are maintained between the underlying rates involved. In this presentation, we outline the issues involved in valuing exotics. We review valuation issues for interest rate derivatives in general, and for caps, floors and swaptions. We outline a pricing methodology and apply it to Bermudan swaptions, range accruals, callable range accruals, spread options and callable spread range accruals. Outline: - Review of interest rate modeling - Handling of vanilla options - - Forward Libor and swap rates - - Caps and Floors - - Swaptions - - Cap stripping - - Smile lifting - Bermudan valuation - - Hedging Bermudans - - LGM model specification of the HW model - - Pricing cashflows and options under the LGM model - - Model calibration - - Numerical methods - Digital options - - Pricing via vanillas. - Range accruals - - Pricing as a portfolio of digitals - - Convexity adjustment - Change of measure and approximation - Callable range accruals - - Pricing under the one factor LGM model - - - Model calibration. - - - Use of control variates (adjusters). - - Calibration and pricing under the two factor LGM model - - - Model calibration. - Spread range accruals - - Pricing under the two factor LGM model.

We examine the effect of high frequency trading on market quality from the perspective of a limit order trader. By competing with slower limit order traders, high frequency traders (HFT) impose a welfare externality by selectively crowding out the most profitable limit orders. The order book imbalance immediately before each order submission, cancelation and trade suggests that high frequency traders strategically use limit order book information to supply liquidity on the thick side of the order book and demand liquidity from the thin side. This strategic behavior is more pronounced during volatile periods and when trading speeds increase.

Spanish Abstract: Se revisa la literatura financiera sobre analistas y fondos de inversión, centrándonos sobre todo en sus habilidades predictivas. ¿Se puede ganar dinero siguiendo las recomendaciones de los analistas? ¿Superó la rentabilidad de los fondos de inversión a la de los índices bursátiles? Veremos que la respuesta a ambas preguntas es que en la mayoría de los casos no. Es obvio que los gestores de fondos y los analistas de bolsa que trabajan para un banco o una empresa confían en que sus predicciones serán correctas alrededor de un 50% de las veces. Si tuvieran confianza en acertar más de un 55% de sus predicciones, no trabajarían a sueldo, sino que se instalarían por su cuenta con la expectativa de tener unos ingresos sensiblemente superiores a sus sueldos. English Abstract: We also provide evidence of the analysts' recommendations for Spanish companies: less than 15% of the recommendations are to sell.

The paper proposes a new measure of spread exposure for corporate bonds portfolios based on a detailed analysis of credit spread behavior. We find that changes in spreads are not parallel but rather linearly proportional to the level of spread, whereby bonds trading at wider spreads experience larger spread changes. Consequently, systematic spread volatility of a sector is proportional to its spread; similarly, the idiosyncratic spread volatility of a particular bond or issuer is proportional to its spread, irrespective of sector, maturity and time period. We confirm that the behavior of spreads results in excess return volatility being proportional to Duration Times Spread (DTS). We demonstrate the advantage of DTS over spread-duration in predicting future excess return volatility, index replication and portfolio construction and discuss the implications of our findings for the formulation of investment constraints, asset allocation, risk modeling and performance attribution.

How important is an understanding of country risk for investors? Given the increasingly global nature of investment portfolios, we believe it is very important. Our paper measures the economic content of five different measures of country risk: The International Country Risk Guide is political risk, the financial risk, economic risk and composite risk indices and Institutional Investoris country credit ratings. First, we explore whether any of these measures contain information about future expected stock returns by conducting trading simulations. Next, we conduct time-series-cross-sectional analysis linking these risk measures to future expected returns. Second, we investigate the relation between these measures and other, more standard, approaches to risk exposures. Finally, we analyze the linkages between fundamental attributes within each economy, such as book-to-price ratios, and the risk measures. Our results suggest that the country risk measures are correlated future equity returns. We find that the country risk measures are correlated with each other, however, financial risk measures contain the most information about future equity returns. Finally, we find that country risk measures are highly correlated with country equity valuation measures. This provides some insight into the reason why value-oriented strategies generate higher returns.

We perform an extensive and robust study of the performance of three different pairs trading strategies - the distance, cointegration, and copula methods - on the entire US equity market from 1962 to 2014 with time-varying trading costs. For the cointegration and copula methods, we design a computationally efficient 2-step pairs trading strategy. In terms of economic outcomes, the distance, cointegration, and copula methods show a mean monthly excess return of 91, 85, and 43 bps (38, 33, and 5 bps) before transaction costs (after transaction costs), respectively. In terms of continued profitability, from 2009, the frequency of trading opportunities via the distance and cointegration methods is reduced considerably whereas this frequency remains stable for the copula method. Further, the copula method shows better performance for its unconverged trades compared to those of the other methods. While the liquidity factor is negatively correlated to all strategies' returns, we find no evidence of their correlation to market excess returns. All strategies show positive and significant alphas after accounting for various risk-factors. We also find that in addition to all strategies performing better during periods of significant volatility, the cointegration method is the superior strategy during turbulent market conditions.

This paper measures diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) using proprietary data from survey responses used to compile the Best Companies to Work For list. We identify 13 of the 58 questions as being related to DEI, and aggregate the responses to form our DEI measure. This variable has low correlation with gender and ethnic diversity in the boardroom, in senior management, and within the workforce, suggesting that DEI captures additional dimensions missing from traditional measures of demographic diversity. DEI is also unrelated to general workplace policies and practices, suggesting that DEI cannot be improved by generic initiatives. DEI is associated with higher future accounting performance across a range of measures, higher future earnings surprises, and higher valuation ratios, but demographic diversity is not. DEI perceptions among professional workers, such as R&D employees, are significantly correlated with the number and quality of patents. However, DEI exhibits no link with future stock returns.

In today's global economy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a core component of corporate strategy. Due in part to financial scandals, losses, and the diminished reputation of the affected listed companies, CRS is emerging as a crucial instrument for minimizing conflicts with stakeholders. While corporations are busy adopting and enhancing CSR practices, there is (beyond a very few notable exceptions) no established empirical research on its impact and relevance for the capital market. Our paper investigates this issue by tracing market reactions to corporate entry into and exit from the Domini 400 Social Index (a recognized CSR benchmark) between 1990 and 2004. Our paper highlights two main findings: i) a significant upward trend in absolute values of abnormal returns, irrespective of the event (entry/exit vis-a-vis the index) type; and ii) a significant negative effect on abnormal returns after announcement from the Domini index. The latter effect continues to persist even after controlling for concurring financial distress shocks and stock market seasonality.

The distance between short- and long-run moving averages of prices (MAD) predicts future equity returns in the cross-section. Annualized value-weighted alphas from the accompanying hedge portfolios are around 9%, and the predictability goes beyond momentum, 52-week highs, profitability, and other prominent anomalies. MAD-based investment payoffs survive reasonable trading costs faced by institutions, and are stronger on the long side relative to the short counterpart.

Spanish Abstract: Esta nota recoge los10 errores más habituales con los que los autores se han encontrado al tratar con abogados en pleitos, en arbitrajes, en consejos de administración, en clase y en adquisiciones. Los errores que se comentan no son exclusivos de los abogados: participan de ellos muchas otras personas de variada formación y actividad profesional. English Abstract: This paper contains a collection and classification of 9 errors seen in courts and sentences. The author had access to most of the valuations referred to in this paper in his capacity as a consultant in trials, in boards, in class and in arbitrage processes.

According to our survey about climate risk perceptions, institutional investors believe climate risks have financial implications for their portfolio firms and that these risks, particularly regulatory risks, already have begun to materialize. Many of the investors, especially the long-term, larger, and ESG-oriented ones, consider risk management and engagement, rather than divestment, to be the better approach for addressing climate risks. Although surveyed investors believe that some equity valuations do not fully reflect climate risks, their perceived overvaluations are not large.

In this paper, we focus on two issues. First, we analyze the potential biases in reported hedge fund returns, in particular survivorship bias and backfill bias, and attempt to create an unbiased return sample. Second, we decompose these returns into their three A,B,C components: the value added by hedge funds (alphas), the systematic market exposures (betas), and the hedge fund fees (costs). We analyze the performance of a universe of about 3,500 hedge funds from the TASS database from January 1995 through April 2006. Our results indicate that both survivorship and backfill biases are potentially serious problems. The equally weighted performance of the funds that existed at the end of the sample period had a compound annual return of 16.45% net of fees. Including dead funds reduced this return to 13.62%. Excluding backfill further reduced the return to 8.98%, net of fees. In this last sample, we estimate a pre-fee return of 12.72%, which we split into a fee (3.74%), an alpha (3.04%), and a beta return (5.94%). Overall, even after correcting for data biases, we find that the alphas are significantly positive and are approximately equal to the fees, meaning that excess returns were shared roughly equally between hedge fund managers and their investors.

Many of the current difficulties in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) can be attributed to a misapplication of agency ratings. Changes in mortgage origination and servicing make it difficult to evaluate the risk of RMBS and CDOs. We show that the big three ratings agencies are often confronted with an array of conflicting incentives, which can affect choices in subjective measurements of risk. Of even greater concern, however, is the fact that the process of creating RMBS and CDOs requires the ratings agencies to arguably become part of the underwriting team, leading to legal risks and even more conflicts. We analyze the fundamental differences between rating structured finance products like RMBS and CDOs and traditional products like corporate debt. We show that the inefficiencies of rating RMBS and CDOs are leading investors to discount U.S. markets. We conclude by providing several policy implications of our findings.