The hedge-fund industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades, offering investors unique investment opportunities that often reflect more complex risk exposures than those of traditional investments. In this article we present a selective review of the recent academic literature on hedge...

During the week of August 6, 2007, a number of quantitative long/short equity hedge funds experienced unprecedented losses. It has been hypothesized that a coordinated deleveraging of similarly constructed portfolios caused this temporary dislocation in the market. Using the simulated returns of...

Biomedical innovation in oncology has become riskier and more expensive, precipitating a withdrawal of private sector funding from the sector. In this article, we consider a portfolio-based approach to funding in which multiple distinct ovarian cancer treatment candidates are funded within a...

Hedge funds are often cited as attractive investments because of their diversification benefits and distinctive risk profiles - in contrast to traditional investments such as stocks and bonds, hedge-fund returns have more complex risk exposures that yield complementary sources of risk premia....

We propose a simple analytical framework to measure the value added or subtracted by stop-loss rules—predetermined policies that reduce a portfolio’s exposure after reaching a certain threshold of cumulative losses—on the expected return and volatility of an arbitrary portfolio strategy....

We propose an evolutionary framework for optimal portfolio growth theory in which investors subject to environmental pressures allocate their wealth between two assets. By considering both absolute wealth and relative wealth between investors, we show that different investor behaviors survive in...

We define long shots as investment projects with four features: (1) low probabilities of success; (2) long gestation lags before any cash flows are realized; (3) large required up-front investments; and (4) very large payoffs (relative to initial investment) in the unlikely event of success....

Current business models have struggled to support early-stage drug development. In this paper, we study an alternative financing model, the mega-fund structure, to fund drug discovery. We extend the framework proposed in previous studies to account for correlation between phase transitions in...

Advances in biomedical research have created significant opportunities to bring to market a new generation of therapeutics. However, early-stage assets often face a dearth of funding, as they have a high risk of failure and significant development costs. Historically, this has been particularly...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disorder affecting thousands of individuals, mainly young males, worldwide. Currently, the disease has no cure, and is fatal in all cases. Advances in our understanding of the disease and innovations in basic science have recently allowed...