Average skewness, which is defined as the average of monthly skewness values across firms, performs well at predicting future market returns. This result still holds after controlling for the size or liquidity of the firms or for current business cycle conditions. We also find that average...

Long-term investors are often reluctant to invest in assets or strategies that can suffer from large drawdowns. A major challenge for such investors is to gain access to predictions of large drawdowns in order to precisely design strategies minimizing these drawdowns. In this paper, we describe...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a sighifiant cost would arise. The performance...