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...

This paper outlines a tactical asset allocation (TAA) strategy that takes signals from the credit markets and applies them to the stock market. A power model is built using the Russell 2000 equity index and the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch High Yield B index. This model is then used in a...

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...

When an event is anticipated, the firm's stock return around the announcement of the event may have an inconsistent sign: a positive sign around negative news, or vice versa. We attempt to quantify the frequency of this problem, first with a brief mathematical model and simulation, then with...

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), as developed by Markowitz (1952) and others, is often described as a nice but impractical theory. The full MPT framework is very sensitive to parameters like the expected returns which are estimated with errors, resulting in allocations with even larger errors....

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...

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...

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...

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...