This chapter gives an overview of current research in evolutionary finance. We mainly focus on the survival and stability properties of investment strategies associated with the Kelly rule. Our approach to the study of the wealth dynamics of investment strategies is inspired by Darwinian ideas...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification--NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)--equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases of...

Evolutionary finance studies the dynamic interaction of investment strategies in financial markets. This market interaction generates a stochastic wealth dynamics on a heterogenous population of traders through the fluctuation of asset prices and their random payoffs. Asset prices are...

In this paper we present a two period model, where the agent's preferences are described by prospect theory as proposed by Kahneman and Tversky. We solve for the agent's portfolio decision. Our findings are that the changes in portfolio weights depend crucially on the reference point and the...

This paper studies the wealth dynamics of investors holding self-financing portfolios in a continuous-time model of a financial market. Asset prices are endogenously determined by market clearing. We derive results on the asymptotic dynamics of the wealth distribution and asset prices for...

Performance of investment managers are evaluated in comparison with benchmarks, such as financial indices. Due to the operational constraint that most professional databases do not track the change of constitution of benchmark portfolios, standard tests of performance suffer from the look-ahead...

This article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of various hedge fund portfolio strategies. Similarly to Avramov et al. (2007), we find that, before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk, hedge fund portfolios that incorporate predictability in managerial skills...

We report strong evidence that changes of momentum, i.e. "acceleration", defined as the first difference of successive returns, provide better performance and higher explanatory power than momentum. The corresponding Γ-factor explains the momentum-sorted portfolios entirely but not the reverse....

Using trading data from a sports-wagering market, we estimate individuals' dynamic risk preferences within the prospect-theory paradigm. This market's experimental-like features facilitate preference estimation, and our long panel enables us to study whether preferences vary across individuals...