We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Replicating portfolios have recently emerged as an important tool in the life insurance industry, used for the valuation of companies' liabilities. This paper presents a replicating portfolio (RP) model for approximating life insurance liabilities as closely as possible. We minimize the L1 error...

A classic paper of Borwein/Lewis (1991) studies optimisation problems over L^p_+ with finitely many linear equality constraints, given by scalar products with functions from L^q. One key result shows that if some x in L^p_+ satisfies the constraints and if the constraint functions are...

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...

This paper considers the nonlinear theory of G-martingales as introduced by Peng in [16, 17]. A martingale representation theorem for this theory is proved by using the techniques and the results established in [20] for the second order stochastic target problems and the second order backward...

We survey several models of liquidity and liquidity related problems such as optimal execution of a large order, hedging and super-hedging options for a large trader, utility maximization in illiquid markets and price impact models with price manipulation strategies

In the recent work of Dempster, Evstigneev and Taksar (2006) it has been shown that the von Neumann-Gale model of economic dynamics can serve as a convenient and natural framework for the analysis of questions of asset pricing and hedging under transaction costs. The present article focuses on a...