The cyclical properties of the annual growth of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) and their implications for short-to-medium term forecasting performance are investigated. We show that the BDI has a cyclical pattern which has been stable except for a period after the 2007 crisis. This pattern has...

We propose a new method for estimating the covariance matrix of a multivariate time series of nancial returns. The method is based on estimating sample covariances from overlapping windows of observations which are then appropriately weighted to obtain the nal covariance estimate. We extend the...