Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

We consider the basic problem of refi tting a time series over a finite period of time and formulate it as a stochastic dynamic program. By changing the underlying Markov decision process we are able to obtain a model that at optimality considers historical data as well as forecasts of future...