This paper presents information on institutional investorsí and investment consultantsí attitudes towards and their performance assumptions for the alternative asset classes, property, and the mainstream markets. It also gives estimates of UK institutional exposures to these asset classes....

"We propose newly developed unsmoothing techniques which are based on a regime-switching Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) model. We first examine analytically conventional unsmoothing techniques which model the true returns by a linear Autoregressive (AR) process ñ and show that when true returns...

The thrust of this paper is to develop a new theoretical framework, based on large deviations theory, for the problem of optimal asset allocation in large portfolios. This problem is, apart from being theoretically interesting, also of practical relevance; examples include, inter alia, hedge funds...

This paper investigates the statistical properties of the Black-Scholes option price, considered as a random variable. The option is conditioned on the current price and/or the estimated volatility of the underlying security. In both cases, some exact results for the distribution functions of...

This study investigates the effects of the market portfolio being unknown on the estimation of beta in the CAPM. Providing an analysis of the impact of using a proxy for the market portfolio when the market portfolio is known. This allows one to ask and answer 'if what' questions, such as if...

The suitability of the elliptical distribution to model asset returns in applied work is examined. Two frameworks are identified: the first framework allows for normality testing but fails to capture the GARCH effect present in the data; the second framework captures the GARCH effect but has the...

The VARLINEX (value at risk linear exponent) forecasting procedure is presented in this paper, which explicitly adjusts the forecasts when the loss functions of the forecaster are asymmetric. The theory of order statistics is applied to derive the VARLINEX forecasts and their corresponding...

We examine two performance measures advocated for asymmetric return distributions: the Sortino ratio—originally introduced by Sortino and Price (Sortino F and Price L 1994 J. Investing 59-65)—and a measure based on power utility introduced in Leland (Leland H 1999 Financial Analysts J....

A number of volatility forecasting studies have led to the perception that the ARCH- and Stochastic Volatility-type models provide poor out-of-sample forecasts of volatility. This is primarily based on the use of traditional forecast evaluation criteria concerning the accuracy and the...