In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreadsof a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities ofdefault (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. Thetime profile and overall level...

An installment option is a European option in which the premium, instead of being paid up-front, is paid in a series of installments. If all installments are paid the holder receives the exercise value, but the holder has the right to terminate payments on any payment date, in which case the...

While stochastic volatility models improve on the option pricing error when compared to theBlack-Scholes-Merton model, mispricings remain. This paper uses mixed normalheteroskedasticity models to price options. Our model allows for significant negative skewnessand time varying higher order...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones index. First, we use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it is more powerful and not restricted only to the best...

In this paper, we consider an investor who plays in a market that involves a risky asset whose instantaneous rate of return changes at unknown random times. This return rate is assumed to follow the law of a Compound Poisson Process. We construct optimal mathematical strategies in this context...

This paper shows that in financial markets with endogenous asset supply and demand, both rational and noise traders do coexist in the long run. The finding implies that financial markets are neither informationally nor allocationally efficient. While rational traders have a consistently higher...

We aim to compare financial technical analysis techniques to strategies which depend on a mathematical model. In this paper, we consider the moving average indicator and an investor using a risky asset whose instantaneous rate of return changes at an unknown random time. We construct...

We consider consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency at any order of a given portfolio with respect to all possible portfolios constructed from a set of assets. We justify block bootstrap approaches to achieve valid inference in a time series setting. The test statistics are computed...

Several attempts have been made to reduce the impact of estimation errors on the optimalportfolio composition. On the one hand, improved estimators of the necessary momentshave been developed and on the other hand, heuristic methods have been generated to enhancethe portfolio performance, for...

In this paper we examine the problem of partially hedging a given credit risk exposure. We derive hedges which satisfy certain optimality criteria: For a given investment into the hedge they minimize the remaining risk, or vice versa. This is motivated by the fact that it is a core business of...