This paper analyses the properties of two popular portfolio strategies. They are the Buy and Hold strategy and the Discretely Rebalanced strategy. It is assumed that the underlying stocks have a multivariate lognormal distribution. The distribution of the sum of correlated lognormals plays a...

This paper derives limit distributions for the sum of two groups of correlated lognormal variables. The within group correlations are equal and the overall covariance matrix has a specific block structure. We prove that the normalized sum of the two groups of lognormal variables converges to a...

This paper establishes conditions under which a portfolio consisting of the averages of K blocks of lognormal variables converges to a K-dimensional lognormal variable as the number of variables in each block increases. The associated block covariance matrix has to have a special structure where...

This paper examines the impact of habit formation on the demand for life-contingent contracts in a life-cycle model. We derive an analytical solution for the optimal consumption, portfolio choice, and life insurance/annuity purchases. We illustrate the mechanism by which the consumption habit...

This paper starts from examining the performance of equally weighted 1/N stock portfolios over time. During the last four decades these portfolios outperformed the market. The construction of these portfolios implies that their constituent stocks are in general older than those in the market as...

Locally-capped products are an economically important and poorly understood category of structured financial products. These contracts combine a guaranteed payoff with a bonus equal to some accumulation of the capped periodic returns of a reference portfolio. We show that these products often...

We propose a "1/N favorability index" to measure how favorable a market is to holding a 1/N portfolio. This index reflects the extent of difficulty for an optimized portfolio to outperform the 1/N portfolio in a specific market. A single-factor model predicts that bull markets are accompanied by...