With the advent in recent years of large financial data sets, machine learning and high-performance computing, analysts can backtest millions (if not billions) of alternative investment strategies. Backtest optimizers search for combinations of parameters that maximize the simulated historical...

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...

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...

This study focuses on the impact of model estimation methods on earnings forecast accuracy. Compared with an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression combined with winsorization, robust regression MM-estimation improves the earnings forecast accuracy of all the models examined, especially for...

We describe characteristics of various risk measures (Value-at-Risk, Expected Shortfall, etc.) that are used to analyze and quantify the tail risk exposure, and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. Emphasis is placed on presenting and comparing methodologies to compute and backtest...

In this paper we come up with an alternate theoretical proof for the independence and unbiased property of extreme value robust volatility estimator with respect to the standard robust volatility estimator as proposed in the paper by Muneer & Maheswaran (2018b). We show that the robust...

Equity basket correlation is an important risk factor. It characterizes the strength of linear dependence between assets and thus measures the degree of portfolio diversification. It can be estimated both under the physical measure from return series, and under the risk neutral measure from...