Copulas are a general tool to construct multivariate distributions and to investigate dependence structure between random variables. However, the concept of copula is not popular in Finance. In this paper, we show that copulas can be extensively used to solve many financial problems.

Although portfolio management didn’t change much during the 40 years after the seminal works of Markowitz and Sharpe, the development of risk budgeting techniques marked an important milestone in the deepening of the relationship between risk and asset management. Risk parity then became a...

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...

In this article, we analyze the impact of weights constraints in portfolio theory using the seminal work of Jagannathan and Ma (2003). They show that solving the global minimum variance portfolio problem with some constraints on weights is equivalent to use a shrinkage estimate of the covariance...

With the recent development of the European debt crisis, traditional index bond management has been severely called into question. We focus here on the risk issues raised by the classical market-capitalization weighting scheme. We propose an approach to properly measure sovereign credit risk in...

Fund selection is an important issue for investors. This topic has spawned abundant academic literature. Nonetheless, most of the time, these works concern only active management, whereas many investors, such as institutional investors, prefer to invest in index funds. The tools developed in the...

Portfolio construction and risk budgeting are the focus of many studies by academics and practitioners. In particular, diversification has spawn much interest and has been defined very differently. In this paper, we analyze a method to achieve portfolio diversification based on the decomposition...

Risk parity is an allocation method used to build diversified portfolios that does not rely on any assumptions of expected returns, thus placing risk management at the heart of the strategy. This explains why risk parity became a popular investment model after the global financial crisis in...

As hedge fund replication based on factor models has encountered growing interest among professionals and academics, and despite the launch of numerous products (indexes and mutual funds) in the past year, it faced many critics. In this paper, we consider three of the main critiques, namely the...

In this paper we propose a cyclical coordinate descent (CCD) algorithm for solving high dimensional risk parity problems. We show that this algorithm converges and is very fast even with large covariance matrices (n 500). Comparison with existing algorithms also shows that it is one of the most...