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...

We develop a novel ranking methodology to rank the market forecaster. In particular, we distinguish forecasts by their specificity, rather than considering all predictions and forecasts equally important, and we also analyze the impact of the number of forecasts made by a particular forecaster....

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...

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...

This paper finds positive evidence of return predictability and investment gains for individual corporate bonds for an extended period from 1973 to 2017. Our sample consists of both public and private company bond observations. We have implemented multiple machine learning methods and designed a...

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...

In this paper we introduce a new class of approaches to empirical asset pricing research, namely LASSO methods augmented by further penalties related to differences in adjacent coefficient estimates (at t and t+1) for a given characteristic. The economic motivation for this is that the...

With approximately 900 million observations we conduct, to our knowledge, the largest study ever of intraday stock return predictability using machine learning techniques finding consistent out-of-sample predictability across market, sector, and individual stock returns at various time horizons....

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...