Consider an agent who holds a stock, but is allowed to buy and hold some quantity of at-the-money put options on the stock. Such an agent must decide the optimal use of financial derivatives under trade restrictions. This paper uses simulation to compare the optimal quantity when the agent...

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) measures the expected loss amount beyond VaR. It has vast advantage over VaR because of its property of coherence. This paper gives an analytical solution in a complete market setting to the risk reward problem faced by a portfolio manager whose portfolio needs...

Empirical evidence suggests that asset returns correlate more strongly in bear markets than conventional correlation estimates imply. We propose a method for determining complete tail-correlation matrices based on Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. We demonstrate how to obtain more efficient...

A model of bank’s dynamic asset management problem in case of partially observed future economic conditions and requirements concerning level of risk taken has been built. It requires solving the resulting optimal control with random terminal condition resulting from partial observation of...

We introduce a canonical representation of call options, and propose a solution to two open problems in option pricing theory. The first problem was posed by (Kassouf, 1969, pg. 694) seeking “theoretical substantiation” for his robust option pricing power law which eschewed assumptions about...

Since the enactment of Pension Protection Act of 2006, lifecycle funds that reduce exposure to stocks with age have rapidly replaced money market funds as the most commonly nominated default investment options for participant-directed retirement plans. We examine their appropriateness in meeting...

The basic paradigm of asset pricing is in vibrant flux. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the psychology of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both risk and misvaluation. This survey sketches a framework for...

Most socially responsible investment funds combine a sustainability objective with a tracking error constraint. We characterize the impact of a sustainability constraint on the mean-tracking error efficient frontier and illustrate this on a universe of US stocks for the period 2003–2010.

We prove a formula for the computation of optimal financial investments in an expected utility framework with arbitrary (not necessarily concave) utility functions. This extends classical results on optimal financial investments for strictly concave utility functions and is of importance...

This paper investigates how the downside tail risk of stock returns is differentiated cross-sectionally. Stock returns follow heavy-tailed distributions with downside tail risk determined by the tail shape and scale. If safety-first investors are concerned with sufficiently large downside...