The paper shows how a particular optimization heuristic, called threshold accepting, can be successfully used to solve complex portfolio choice problems.

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

Estimation and modelling problems as they arise in many fields often turn out to be intractable by standard numerical methods. One way to deal with such a situation consists in simplifying models and procedures. However, the solutions to these simplified problems might not be satisfying. A...

We investigate portfolio selection with alternative objective functions in a distributed computing environment. In particular, we optimise a portfolio's 'Omega' which is the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distributions. Since finding optimal portfolios under such performance...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distribution. Finding Omega-optimal portfolios, in particular under realistic constraints like cardinality restrictions, requires to...

The Nelson-Siegel-Svensson model is widely-used for modelling the yield curve, yet many authors have reported ‘numerical difficulties' when calibrating the model. We argue that the problem is twofold: firstly, the optimisation problem is not convex and has multiple local optima. Hence standard...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of a portfolio's return distribution. The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the empirical performance of the selected portfolios, especially...

Given a set of tick-by-tick data of five currency pairs we analyze several traditional asset allocation techniques as well as technical trading rule based models. In particular we explore appropriate levels of time aggregation and rebalancing frequencies. We also suggest a triggered...

As a result of the recent financial crises, equity markets have performed poorly in the last five years or so. In consequence, equity long-only strategies have generally been unattractive over this period. This motivates the investigation on whether better performance can be achieved by...

In practical portfolio choice models risk is often defined as VaR, expected short-fall, maximum loss, Omega function, etc. and is computed from simulated future scenarios of the portfolio value. It is well known that the minimization of these functions can not, in general, be performed with...