It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

Classical quantitative finance models such as the Geometric Brownian Motion or its later extensions such as local or stochastic volatility models do not make sense when seen from a physics-based perspective, as they are all equivalent to a negative mass oscillator with a noise. This paper...

The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

Transaction cost variance introduces a risk often neglected in portfolio optimization. We define a mean-variance portfolio optimization problem and show that including a transaction cost variance term significantly impacts the performance of these portfolios. Transaction cost variance is...

In this work, we propose an ARMA(1,1)-GARCH(1,1) model with standard classical tempered stable (CTS) innovations for historical daily returns of 29 selected stocks. The non-Gaussian nature of the innovations captures the fat-tail property observed in data. The dependency between different assets...

[Update: Within four weeks of the original publication of this research report, Risk Magazine reported in its 28th February 2012 issue story titled 'Goodbye VaR? Basel to Consider Other Risk Metrics': "A review of trading book capital rules, due to be launched in March by the Basel Committee on...

One of the most important factors to control for the achievements of investment portfolio returns is risk. If we only think that a 100% positive return is needed to recover a portfolio loss of 50%, we can understand why. With the advent of the exponential growth of technology usage in markets,...

This paper examines the lead/lag relations between size-sorted portfolio returns through the lens of financial cycles governing these returns using a novel econometric methodology. Specifically, we develop a Markov-switching vector autoregressive model that allows for imperfect synchronization...

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, some risk management practitioners have advocated wider adoption of Bayesian inference to replace Value- at-Risk (VaR) models in order to minimize risk failures. Despite its limitations, the Bayesian methodology has significant advantages. Just...

In aftermath of the Financial Crisis, some risk management practitioners advocate wider adoption of Bayesian inference to replace Value-at-Risk (VaR) models for minimizing risk failures (Borison & Hamm, 2010). They claim reliance of Bayesian inference on subjective judgment, the key limitation...