While a routinely rebalanced portfolio such as a 60-40 equity-bond mix is commonly employed by many investors, most do not understand that the rebalancing strategy adds risk. Rebalancing is similar to starting with a buy and hold portfolio and adding a short straddle (selling both a call and a...

In general, individuals will be interested in consumption of goods with “original”prices denominated in various currencies. Traditional risk management is nominally orientedand typically neglects this differentiated consumption preferences of investors. We outline therelevance of a consumption...

Despite a considerable premium on equity with respect to risk free assets, many households do not own stocks. We ask why the prevalence of stockholding is so limited. We focus on individuals' attitudes towards risk and identify relevant factors that affect the willingness to take financial...

Over the 2016-2019 period, we released a series of research papers on the topic of “strategic risk management”, or the embedding of risk management into investment strategy design. We show that key risk controls that we introduced materially helped during the sharp equity market selloff in...

This paper studies the restrictions on consumption, portfolio choice, and social discounting implied by a sustainability constraint, that utility should not be expected to decline over time, in an economy with risky investment opportunities. The sustainability constraint does not distort...

A mechanical rebalancing strategy, such as a monthly or quarterly reallocation towards fixed portfolio weights, is an active strategy. Winning asset classes are sold and losers are bought. During crises, when markets are often trending, this can lead to substantially larger drawdowns than a...

We use data on Indian stock portfolios to show that return heterogeneity is the primary contributor to increasing inequality of wealth held in risky assets by Indian individual investors. Return heterogeneity increases equity wealth inequality through two main channels, both of which are related...

We show analytically under quite general conditions that implied rates of return based on analysts' earnings forecasts are only a downward biased estimator for future expected one-period returns and therefore not suited for computing market risk premia. The extent of this bias is substantial as...

Several attempts have been made to reduce the impact of estimation errors on the optimal portfolio composition. On the one hand, improved estimators of the necessary moments have been developed and on the other hand, heuristic methods have been generated to enhance the portfolio performance, for...

The estimation of expected security returns is one of the major tasks for the practical implementation of the Markowitz portfolio optimization. Against this background, in 1992 Black and Litterman developed an approach based on (theoretically established) expected equili-brium returns which...