This article assumes general stationary processes for prices and derives the autocorrelation function for a general Moving Average (MA) trading rule to investigate why this rule is used. The result shows that the MA rule is popular because it can identify price momentum and is a simple way of...

Mean-variance optimisation has been roundly criticised by financial economists and practitioners alike, leading many to advocate a simple 1/N weighting heuristic. We investigate the performance of the Markowitz technique conditional on investor forecasting ability. Using a novel analytical...

The use of correlation between forecasts and actual returns is commonplace in the literature, often used as a measurement of investors’ skill. A prominent application of this is the concept of the Information Coefficient (IC). Not only can IC be used as a tool to rate analysts and fund...

In the matter of financial literacy it is often supposed that more is automatically preferable to less. This paper considers to what extent this may be true generally, and specifically focuses on the case of investment forecasting skill (a significant component of an individual's financial...

The authors develop a test of infinite degree stochastic dominance based on the use of the empirical moment generating function. Two applications are considered. One uses the income data of Anderson (Econometrica, 1996) and derives results consistent with his. In the other application, the...

In light of recent regulatory initiatives focusing on fair treatment of customers in financial markets, this paper examines the agency problem created by an asset manager with market impact, segregated accounts and preference-based contracts. It illustrates how aggregate client welfare and...

We develop a methodology for improving the estimate of the risk premia calculated jointly with the asset sensitivities, extending the McElroy-Burmeister approach for estimating the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (Ross 1976) as a restricted nonlinear multivariate regression model using observed...