Private equity and venture capital (PE/VC) funding is the provision of equity capital by financial investors to non-quoted companies with high growth potential. It has a particular emphasis on entrepreneurial activities rather than on mature businesses. PE/VC investors differ on several...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

The aim of this paper is to assess the effectiveness and risk in the stock exchange market in Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEE) in view of the largest stock exchanges: NYSE2‑LSE‑HKSE2. The implementation of this objective was based on an analysis of basic stock market indicators and...

The return dynamics of Argentina's main stock index, the SP Mer.Val., show a high level of volatility, signaling a higher degree of downside risk. To hedge against that specific risk, investors could buy put options. However, the Argentinean capital markets lacks variety of hedging contracts....

A value investing strategy consists of purchasing stocks relatively undervalued to their funda-mental values and selling those relatively overvalued. Finding this kind of companies has been one of the most challenging goals for investors throughout the history. The main objective of this paper...

Conventional financial theory considers ex-ante that risk, generally measured by the volatility, has to be appropriately rewarded by expected returns. In modern financial markets, there are countless quantitative and systematic strategies which may test and eventually lead to excess returns when...

Few papers provide research about options returns, and the few available are focused in the analysis from the perspective of the long side of the option contract, i.e. the buyer that pays the price and her expected and realized option return. The main point of our research work is to provide a...

The purpose of this paper is to measure the potential impact of business-sector concentration on economic capital for loan portfolios and to explore a tractable model for its measurement. The empirical part evaluates the increase in economic capital in a multi-factor asset value model for...

When analyzing options returns, most papers tend to focus on the expected and realized return from strategies where the investors are long on those financial instruments. We conduct a test searching for excess returns on passive options investment strategies resorting to a four factor model,...

Investors have traditionally relied on mean-variance analysis to determine a portfolio’s optimal asset mix, but they have struggled to incorporate private equity into this framework because they do not know how to estimate its risk. The observed volatility of private equity returns is...