Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

In recent years both equity and bond markets have been afflicted by high volatility. In order to build up a portfolio on a quantitative basis, several models may be used, such as minimum variance portfolio or equally weighted portfolio. In 2008/09 another way to deal with diversification came...

Macroeconomic data is often noisy, contradictory and lagging. These limitations render the data difficult to integrate into a robust quantitative investment strategy that generates excess returns. This paper outlines a new approach to macro investing that removes these inherent limitations in...

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...

Ever since Harry Markowitz published his seminal paper on portfolio selection, investors have incorporated estimates of future volatilities and correlations into their asset allocation process. While portfolio construction methods continue to evolve, many investors continue to forecast...

Return chasing is often cited as one of the primary behavioral foibles of investors, resulting in sub-par returns. Surprisingly, the literature does not provide a generally accepted and testable description of return chasing. This paper proposes a simple definition. It then describes how return...

You're probably familiar, at least in passing, with the 'convexity' of long-term bonds - i.e. that yields dropping 1% produce a bigger price move than yields rising 1%. A significant amount of brainpower has gone into understanding all the ramifications of this convexity in the fixed income...

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,...

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...

In the past 20 years, momentum or trend following strategies have become an established part of the investor toolbox. We introduce a new way of analyzing momentum strategies by looking at the information ratio (IR, average return divided by standard deviation). We calculate the theoretical IR of...