We present a comprehensive framework for comparing the merits of alternative portfolio insurance strategies in realistic contexts. Our findings add generality to previous results comparing option based and constant proportionality portfolio insurance strategies (OBPI and CPPI). The optimal OBPI...

We design average portfolio insurance (API) strategies with an investment floor and a buffer that is a power of a geometric average of the underlying asset price. We prove that API strategies are optimal for investors with hyperbolic absolute risk aversion who become progressively more risk...

The aim of this paper is to determine whether forward-looking option- implied returns forecasts lead to better out-of-sample portfolio performance than conventional time series models. We consider a simple two-asset setting with a risk-free asset and the S&P 500 index the risky asset with...

This paper is the first to utilize a direct test for periodic, partially collapsing speculative bubbles in US REIT prices. A long history of data is employed for the All, Mortgage and Equity REIT categories. This approach is more powerful than existing tests and is based on the formulation of a...

The skewness in physical distributions of equity index returns and the implied volatility skew in the risk-neutral measure are subjects of extensive academic research. Much attention is now being focused on models that are able to capture time-varying conditional skewness and kurtosis. For this...

Most banks employ historical simulation for Value-at-Risk (VaR) calculations, where VaR is computed from a lower quantile of a forecast distribution for the portfolio’s profit and loss (P&L) that is constructed from a single, multivariate historical sample on the portfolio’s risk factors....

We quantify and endogenize the model risk associated with quantile estimates using a maximum entropy distribution (MED) as benchmark. Moment-based MEDs cannot have heavy tails, however generalized beta generated distributions have attractive properties for popular applications of quantiles....

Fixed income analysts are accustomed to monitoring a few benchmark yields on a continuous basis and to providing point estimates for these yields, or for a combination of them. Yet, the optimisation of fixed income portfolios requires an accurate forecast of not only a few benchmark yields, but...

Most research on option hedging has compared the performance of delta hedges derived from different stochastic volatility models with Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) deltas, and in particular with the `implied BSM’ model in which an option’s delta is based on its own market implied volatility....

This paper contributes to the debate on the effects of the financialization of commodity futures markets by studying the conditional volatility of long-short commodity portfolios and their conditional correlation with traditional assets (stocks and bonds). Using several groups of trading...