We investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women. Apart from a gender difference in risk aversion, gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold more risky assets. Our results show that men tend to be...

This paper analyses the relationship between dispositional optimism and stock investments. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Dispositional optimism is found to be a relevant predictor of the ownership of stocks as well as of the share...

When should you harvest a tax loss? Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy used to improve the net of tax returns of a portfolio, where an investor deliberately sells assets that have incurred a loss in order to use these losses to offset current or future capital gains. However, an important...

This chapter gives an overview of current research in evolutionary finance. We mainly focus on the survival and stability properties of investment strategies associated with the Kelly rule. Our approach to the study of the wealth dynamics of investment strategies is inspired by Darwinian ideas...

The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Strategy (KCGIS) is to maximize the expected utility of nal wealth with a logarithmic utility function. This approach dates to Bernoulli's 1738 suggestion of log as the utility function arguing that marginal utility was proportional to the reciprocal of...

Diversification has been long considered an essential part of investing for the long term. Our paper aims to look further on portfolio diversification and how asset allocation can be optimized. We suggest that the selection of investments in a portfolio should be based on how the market behaves...

This paper identifies a clear tradeoff between tracking error — performance differences relative to a targeted asset allocation — and turnover—a proxy for rebalancing costs — that can help guide investors’ rebalancing choices. We find that calendar-based approaches, while convenient,...