Student managed investment funds provide students the opportunity to manage a portfolio of real dollar investments and earn academic credit. Student managed funds typically benefit a University through improved course offerings within the field of finance where academic knowledge and practical...

We consider philanthropy by college alums from an innovative and provocative perspective: what if prospective college students were considered members of assets classes with different risk-return combinations? Using forty years of merged admissions-philanthropy records on students at a highly...

Accepted wisdom, assuming capital market equilibrium and low cash returns, advises investors to hold optimal portfolios containing little cash. But credit crunches - periods of non-price credit rationing when effective cash yields are very high - happen in the real world. Because of this, it is...

Index tracking has long been of interest for both industry of fund management andacademia. Various methods have been proposed and tested and various issues arediscussed throughout the past 30 years. Yet one issue remains unresolved is how toperform stock selection optimally. In this paper, I...

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...

Modelling and forecasting of asset volatility and covariance is of prime importance in the construction of portfolios. In this paper, we present a generalised multi-factor model that incorporates heteroskedasticity and dependence in the idiosyncratic error terms. We apply this model to...

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...

We introduce Dynamic Entropy Pooling, a quantitative technique to perform dynamic portfolio construction with discretionary, non-synchronous views. With Dynamic Entropy Pooling, the portfolio manager can embed in the allocation process signals with life spans ranging from minutes to years,...

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,...

This paper analyses the fundamental drivers of risk and return in portfolios of private equity fund investments. We draw on a large data set of 771 mature European and North American primary buyout funds with historic performance information from Preqin covering vintages from 1998-2007. Using...