Private investors increasingly use passive investment strategies, i.e. investment methods that try to replicate a stock market index as accurate as possible. In this paper we compare retail index certificates and exchange traded funds. Both investment products promise a performance that...

The objective of this paper is to determine the best predictor of equity market crashes by focusing particularly on volatility and market liquidity. In finance, volatility has traditionally been regarded as the best measure of market risk. However, this paper shows that the forecast value of...

This study designs an optimal insurance policy form endogenously, assuming the objective of the insured is to maximize expected final wealth under the Value-at-Risk (VaR) constraint. The optimal insurance policy can be replicated using three options, including a long call option with a small...

This study is on valuing Asian strike options and presents efficient and accurate quadratic approximation methods that work extremely well, both with regard to the volatility of a wide range of underlying assets, and longer average time windows. We demonstrate that most of the well-known...

This article explores the relationships between several forecasts for the volatility built from multi-scale linear ARCH processes, and linear market models for the forward variance. This shows that the structures of the forecast equations are identical, but with different dependencies on the...

Estimating quantile sensitivities is important in many optimization applications, from hedging in financial engineering to service-level constraints in inventory control to more general chance constraints in stochastic programming. Recently, Hong (Hong, L. J. 2009. Estimating quantile...

Using time-varying systematic risk model, the paper estimates risk in a number of stock markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including Saudi, Kuwait, Dubai and Abu-Dhabi markets. The results in the paper indicate that Saudi market is the most perilous in the group, as it...