The 2007-2008 financial crisis has made it painfully obvious that markets may quickly turn illiquid. Moreover, recent experience has shown that distress and lack of active trading can jump 'around' between seemingly unconnected parts of the financial system contributing to transforming isolated...

"One key stylized fact in the empirical option pricing literature is the existence of an implied volatility surface (IVS). The usual approach consists of fitting a linear model linking the implied volatility to the time to maturity and the moneyness, for each cross section of options data....

"This paper proposes a new tractable approach to solving asset allocation problems in situations with a large number of risky assets which pose problems for standard numerical approaches. Investor preferences are assumed to be defined over moments of the wealth distribution such as its skewness...