We prove that high simulated performance is easily achievable after backtesting a relatively small number of alternative strategy configurations, a practice we denote “backtest overfitting”. The higher the number of configurations tried, the greater is the probability that the backtest is...

Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2016) “argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.” Surprisingly, their false discovery rate (FDR) estimates suggest most are true. I revisit their results by developing non- and semi-parametric FDR estimators that account for...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

Correlation matrices are ubiquitous in finance. Some key applications include portfolio construction, risk management, and factor/style analysis. Correlation matrices are usually estimated from historical empirical observations or derived from historically estimated factors. It is widely...

In this paper I examine whether one can use analyst forecasts of macroeconomic variables to improve investors ex-ante allocation of wealth between stocks and bonds. Such forecasts provide a forward-looking approach which I find improves investor's information set for the myopic stock-bond...

In the present paper an attempt has been made to estimate how political stability affects stock prices. This analysis refers to EU, Japan and the United States for the period (1997–2012). The findings of present model are in agreement with (Nixon, 2014); (Voth, 2001). The econometric model...

This paper re-examines the liquidity effect on stock expected returns in the NYSE over the period 1926–2008, the pre-1963 period, for which there is a lack of research, and the post-1963 period. The results from the entire sample of 1926–2008 show that expected returns increase with the...

This paper explores the impact of volatility estimation methods on theoretical option values based upon the Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) model. Volatility is the only input used in the BSM model that cannot be observed in the market or a priori determined in a contract. Thus, properly calculating...

We investigate predictive abilities of nonlinear models for stock returns when density forecasts are evaluated and compared instead of the conditional mean point forecasts. The aim of this paper is to show whether the in-sample evidence of strong nonlinearity in mean may be exploited for...

We introduce a novel and convenient approach to utility modeling. In doing so, we present a general utility function in a very simple exact form. Furthermore, we develop a method to (accurately) measure preferences without any utility data. We also devise a method to measure the marginal...