It is widely known that the common risk-factors derived from PCA beyond the first eigenportfolio are generally difficult to interpret and thus to use in practical portfolio management. We explore a alternative approach (HPCA) which makes strong use of the partition of the market into sectors. We...

Modeling cross-sectional correlations between thousands of stocks, acrosscountries and industries, can be challenging. In this paper, we demonstratethe advantages of using Hierarchical Principal Component Analysis (HPCA)over the classic PCA. We also introduce a statistical clustering algorithmto...

This paper discusses portfolio construction for investing in N given assets, e.g. constituents of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or large cap stocks, which is based on partitioning the investment universe into clusters. The clusters are determined from the trailing correlation matrix...

We undertake a systematic study of the univariate and multivariate properties of CDS spreads using the CDS spread time series of CDX Investment Grade index constituents from 2005 to 2009. We find that CDS spread returns appear to be stationary and exhibit positive autocorrelations,...