The capital structure of a firm is composed of equity and debt. In the Merton approach, equity holders hold a call option on the firm value, while bond holders are short a put on the firm value. Dividends paid to holders of equity provide them with current cash flow. The pay out of dividends to...

The probability distribution for the relative return of a portfolio constructed from a subset n of the assets from a benchmark, consisting of N assets whose returns are multivariate normal, is completely characterized by its tracking error. However, if the benchmark asset returns are not...

This article deals with the problem of optimal allocation of capital to corporate bonds in fixed income portfolios when there is the possibility of correlated defaults. Using a multivariate normal Copula function for the joint default probabilities we show that retaining the first few moments of...

Mortgage prepayments play a crucial role in the pricing and hedging of mortgage backed securities. An important feature of mortgage prepayment modeling is burnout; as time goes on those borrowers who have the greatest tendency to refinance are removed from the pool leaving only those that are...

The probability distribution for the relative return of a portfolio constructed from a subset n of the assets from a benchmark, consisting of N assets whose returns are multivariate normal, is completely characterized by its tracking error. However, if the benchmark asset returns are not...

This article deals with the problem of optimal allocation of capital to corporate bonds in fixed income portfolios when there is the possibility of correlated defaults. Under fairly general assumptions for the distribution of the total net assets of a set of firms we show that retaining the...

We investigate the optimal stop-loss on the alpha investment for a portable alpha vehicle. The optimal stop-loss maximizes investors utility of wealth for a portfolio consisting of a portable alpha fund and risk-free assets. We model the dynamics of the assets as a combination of a normal era...

This paper addresses aspects of the current financial market crisis by drawing analogies from the physics of phase transitions. If such an analogy is indeed appropriate, then the evolving dynamics of financial markets might have characteristics that the traditional models of finance will not be...

Option prices theoretically encapsulate participants' expectations about good state (bullish) and bad state (bearish) market outcomes. By using a mixture of distributions and reasonable assumptions, the authors extract time series of expected returns, volatilities and mixture probabilities of...

Investors are always in search of diversifying securities and strategies to assist in downside risk management. We consider six popular diversifying securities, i.e. Gold, Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen, Bond Futures, S&P 500 80% strike Put Options, and Trend Following strategies in this paper. Using...