After taking into account biases induced by infrequent trading and selection, it is unlikely that illiquid asset classes have higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional liquid stock and bond markets. On the other hand, there are significant illiquidity premiums within asset classes. Portfolio...

American university and college endowments now hold close to one-third of their portfolios in private equity and hedge funds. We estimate the implied beliefs of endowments about alternative assets' returns relative to equities and bonds. At the end of 2012, the typical endowment believes that...

Factor investing asks: how well can a particular investor weather hard times relative to the average investor? Answering helps her reap long-run factor premiums by embracing risks that lose money during bad times, but make up for it the rest of the time with attractive rewards. When factor...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

In the approximately 10,000 advisor portfolios that we analyze at the security level, we find there are large common patterns and significant exposures to just a few factors. Advisor portfolios are heavily exposed to economic growth, which is mostly accessed through equities, and could obtain...

About once a quarter. We compute optimal tactical asset allocation (TAA) policies over equities and bonds when both asset returns are predictable. By varying how often the weights are reset, we estimate the benefits and costs of different frequencies of TAA decisions. Tactical tilts taking...

The foundation for a long-term investment strategy is rebalancing to fixed asset class positions, which are determined in a one-period portfolio choice problem where the asset weights reflect the investor's attitude toward risk. Rebalancing is a counter-cyclical strategy that has worked well...

Bitcoin (BTC) returns exhibit pronounced positive skewness with a third central moment of approximately 150% per year. They are well characterized by a mixture of Normals distribution with one “normal” regime and a small probability of a “bliss” regime where the price appreciation is...

American university and college endowments now hold close to one-third of their portfolios in private equity and hedge funds. We estimate the implied beliefs of endowments about alternative assets' returns relative to equities and bonds. At the end of 2012, the typical endowment believes that...