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...

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

We investigate portfolio selection with alternative objective functions in a distributed computing environment. In particular, we optimise a portfolio's 'Omega' which is the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distributions. Since finding optimal portfolios under such performance...

This paper analyzes competition between mutual funds in a multiple funds version of the model of Hugonnier and Kaniel. We characterize the set of equilibria for this delegated portfolio management game and show that there exists a unique Pareto optimal equilibrium. The main result of this paper...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distribution. Finding Omega-optimal portfolios, in particular under realistic constraints like cardinality restrictions, requires to...

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependence between her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminal payoff . Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to a rather concentrated...

The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financing trading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. We study this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under cone constraints: Trading strategies must take values in a...

We solve the problem of mean-variance hedging for general semimartingale models via stochastic control methods. After proving that the value process of the associated stochastic control problem has a quadratic structure, we characterise its three coefficient processes as solutions of...

We propose a simplified approach to mean-variance portfolio problems by changing their parametrisation from trading strategies to final positions. This allows us to treat, under a very mild no-arbitrage-type assumption, a whole range of quadratic optimisation problems by simple mathematical...