The recent financial crisis renewed concerns about a possible destabilizing impact of derivatives trading. Despite a very active research, the question whether or not derivatives tend to destabilize financial markets has not yet been answered to satisfaction. This contribution aims to revise the...

The seminal work by Markowitz in 1959 introduced portfolio theory to the world. The prevailing notion since then has been that portfolio risk is non linear i.e. you cannot use Linear Programming (LP) to optimize your portfolio. We will in this paper show that simple portfolio drawdown...

The goal of this paper is to present an original and simple analysis aimed to understand why investing in capital markets can be very dangerous for "naive investors". Stock markets display often exploding volatility. They are characterized by instability and subject to external shocks. If...

Although bonds are less volatile than equities and the median bond fund holds about 200 bonds, bond investors still need to hold more than one bond fund to realize the optimal benefit of diversification. The simulation results show that three to five bond funds reduce standard deviation of...

The severe political turmoil provoked by an allegedly mispriced private bond issue in Greece added to the controversial matter of whether prices of structured bonds sold to investors are "fair" or not. In this paper structured bond market is analysed with particular focus on valuation issues. It...

This study attempts to examine the price discovery process and volatility spillovers in Gold futures and spot markets of National Commodity Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) by employing Johansen’s Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and the Bivariate ECM-EGARCH(1,1) model. The empirical result...

This paper aims to study the relative information shares of spot and futures market at the individual stock level to measure the price discovery in spot and futures market in the Indian capital markets. We find that the spot and futures prices are co-integrated and mutually adjusting. Building...

We study optimal hedging design for returns on an Italian equity mutual fund index since 2008. Alternative hedging instruments include one-month futures contracts for FTSE-MIB, FTSE100 and Xetra DAX. We use bivariate models of our Italian equity mutual fund index and each hedging instrument to...