We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading...

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...

In modern portfolio theory, financial portfolios are characterised by a desired property, the 'reward', and something undesirable, the 'risk'. While these properties are commonly identified with mean and variance of returns, respectively, we test alternative specifications like partial and...

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 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...

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...

We present a careful analysis of possible issues of the application of the self-excited Hawkes process to high-frequency financial data and carefully analyze a set of effects that lead to significant biases in the estimation of the "criticality index'' n that quantifies the degree of endogeneity...

For portfolio choice problems with proportional transaction costs, we discuss whether or not there exists a shadow price, i.e., a least favorable frictionless market extension leading to the same optimal strategy and utility. By means of an explicit counter-example, we show that shadow prices...