This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Econometric Reviews', 2008, 27, 199-229.<P> This paper investigates the merits of high-frequency intraday data when forming minimum variance portfolios and minimum tracking error portfolios with daily rebalancing from the individual constituents...</p>

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...