Leveraged and inverse exchange-traded funds seek daily returns equal to fixed multiples of indexes' returns. Trading costs implied by frequent adjustments of funds' portfolios create a tension between tracking error, reflecting short-term correlation with the index, and excess return, the...

Most institutional investors gain access to commodities through diversified index funds, even though mean-reverting prices and low correlation among commodities returns indicate that two-fund separation does not hold for commodities. In contrast to demand for stocks and bonds, we find that, on...

We develop a new method to optimize portfolios of options in a market where European calls and puts are available with many exercise prices for each of several potentially correlated underlying assets. We identify the combination of asset-specific option payoffs that maximizes the Sharpe ratio...

This paper evaluates the effect of market integration on prices and welfare, in a model where two Lucas trees grow in separate regions with similar investors. We find equilibrium asset price dynamics and welfare both in segmentation, when each region holds its own asset and consumes its...

Investing on behalf of a firm, a trader can feign personal skill by committing fraud that with high probability remains undetected and generates small gains, but that with low probability bankrupts the firm, offsetting ostensible gains. Honesty requires enough skin in the game: if two traders...

Time-varying asset returns lead highly risk-averse investors to choose market-timing exposures that increase in their horizon, in agreement with the common advice to reduce risk with age, but in contrast to theoretical work that prescribes constant portfolio weights. In a market where an...

This paper examines the performance from 1996 to 2020 of mean-variance efficient portfolios of monthly options with all available strikes on each of the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Dow Jones indexes, using a constrained optimization approach that incorporates position limits, transaction costs, and...

We solve a general equilibrium model of an incomplete market with heterogeneous preferences, identifying first-order and second-order effects. Several long-lived agents with different absolute risk-aversion and discount rates make consumption and investment decisions, borrowing from and lending...

Compared with existing payment systems, Bitcoin’s throughput is low. Designed to address Bitcoin’s scalability challenge, the Lightning Network (LN) is a protocol allowing two parties to secure bitcoin payments and escrow holdings between them. In a lightning channel, each party commits...