I had the pleasure to hear Dr. Soheil Mahmoodzadeh discuss his job market paper (Mahmoodzadeh & Gençay, 2015) recently at the University of Victoria Department of Economics seminar. The paper studies the effect of changes to tick size from pip to decimal pip for major currency pairs by the...

Tail hedging is a portfolio management strategy meant to reduce the risk of large losses. For an investor who holds a stock market index fund, the strategy entails buying out of the money put options on the index. Research suggests the strategy works well in practice and I explore the returns to...

Exploration is a costly activity that helps a business improve their understanding of a potential mineral deposit. Yet, even with strong exploration results, the business faces uncertainty over the value of the mine. I model this situation as a game of chance. The game starts by giving an agent...

Consider an agent who holds a stock, but is allowed to buy and hold some quantity of at-the-money put options on the stock. Such an agent must decide the optimal use of financial derivatives under trade restrictions. This paper uses simulation to compare the optimal quantity when the agent...

This paper presents two computational techniques and shows that these techniques can improve tests for market efficiency based on profit of trading rules. The two techniques focus on interval estimates for expected profit per trade, in contrast to the standard approach that emphasizes point...

The new methodology to study the impact of corporate events on bonds is comprised of a sampling technique and regression model. The method is different from standard approaches, motivated by the belief that event impact should be reflected in levels of yield premium. The regression tests for a...

The profit surface is a visualization technique for data computed from trading rules. I simulate price paths and operate the trading rules to compute cumulative returns for the rule under different specifications. The specifications are pairs of integers, filter lag lengths, so a contour plot is...

Leveraged ETF are mandated to provide a multiple of the return on an index for intraday time periods. I present statistical estimates of beta for two leveraged ETF and one index at sampling rates from one to twenty five minute sampling. I find that beta is close to the leverage factor for...

This paper explores unintended consequences of policy that restricts land ownership. I describe certain farmland investment funds that are active in Canada, policy in the Province of Saskatchewan that has restricted ownership since 1974, and how the two are related. I argue that global economic...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a trading strategy for overlapping ETF and calculate the profitability using real price data. For two overlapping ETF that are designed to provide the same intraday percentage change, the difference in percentage changes is a measure of mispricing. This...