Present market instabilities have prompted great interest on the characteristics of specific portfolios such as minimum variance and equally- weighted risk contribution portfolios as these portfolios do not rely on the estimate of expected returns. Indeed, in turmoil periods traditional market...

Momentum and Reversion have always been seen as independent of each other and never as a composite. This study explains how the two behaviors are not only connected but also get transformed into each other. This dynamics drives not only stock market systems but all natural systems. One reason...

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...

Asset allocation strategies which utilize stop-loss and stop-gain rules may dramatically decrease risk and even increase long-term return relative to passive investing. I introduce an asset allocation strategy which shifts portfolio weights based on simplistic stop rules. The two-asset (S&P...

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

If you put two mounds of sugar with identical conditions near an ants' nest, which one will the ants congregate at? Kirman explained the process of ant social herding using a simple model, and he conducted an interesting simulation. The fat tail distribution in the security market is well known,...

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...

VAA (Vigilant Asset Allocation) is a dual-momentum based investment strategy with a vigorous crash protection and a fast momentum filter. Dual momentum combines absolute (trendfollowing) and relative (strength) momentum. Compared to the traditional dual momentum approaches, we have replaced the...

This paper follows Keller (2012), which introduced the Flexible Asset Allocation (FAA) concept. FAA is based on a weighted ranking score of historical asset returns (R), volatilities (V), and correlations to an equal weighted index (C). We call this “generalized momentum” since we assume...

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...