The complex behavior of financial markets emerges from decisions made by many traders. Here, we exploit a large corpus of daily print issues of the Financial Times from 2nd January 2007 until 31st December 2012 to quantify the relationship between decisions taken in financial markets and...

Classical asset allocation methods have assumed that the distribution of asset returns is smooth, well behaved with stable statistical moments over time. The distribution is assumed to have constant moments with e.g., Gaussian distribution that can be conveniently parameterised by the first two...

The persistent nature of equity volatility is investigated by means of a multi-factor stochastic volatility model with time varying parameters. The parameters are estimated by means of a sequential matching procedure which adopts as auxiliary model a time-varying generalization of the HAR model...

Pricing kernels implicit in option prices play a key role in assessing the risk aversion over equity returns. We deal with nonparametric estimation of the pricing kernel (Empirical Pricing Kernel) given by the ratio of the risk-neutral density estimator and the subjective density estimator. The...

Lotteries are a curious phenomenon in financial markets, as they seem to contradict traditional utility models that predict rational behavior under uncertainty. Despite this, lotteries continue to attract the interest of many investors who knowingly or unknowingly trade their expectations of...

Using leverage to magnify performance is an idea that has enticed investors and traders throughout history. The critical question of when to employ leverage and when to reduce risk, though, is not often addressed. We establish that volatility is the enemy of leverage and that streaks in...

As a preliminary study of the effect of return and sampling on chaos and stochastic data pattern, this research tests chaos pattern by using Henon attractor as a sample of two-dimensional discrete chaos data with an assumption that economic and finance data are generated by low dimensional chaos...

Fixed income investors favor higher yields with lower risk. Our objective in this paper is to outline an active fixed income strategy that maximizes yield and is protected against major risk factors affecting fixed income securities. In particular, we look at interest rate risk, credit risk,...

We improve on our Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA) by the introduction of a separate “canary” universe for signaling the need for crash protection, using the concept of breadth momentum. The amount of cash is now governed by the number of canary assets with bad (non-positive) momentum. The...