We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

We define a dynamic and self-adjusting mixture of Gaussian Graphical Models to cluster financial returns, and provide a new method for extraction of nonparametric estimates of dynamic alphas (excess return) and betas (to a choice set of explanatory factors) in a multivariate setting. This...

This paper minimizes the risk of Brent oil in a multivariate portfolio, with three risk-minimizing goals: variance, parametric value-at-risk (VaR), and semiparametric value-at-risk. Brent oil is combined with five emerging ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) stock indexes and five...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

Beta-sorted portfolios - portfolios comprised of assets with similar covariation to selected risk factors - are a popular tool in empirical finance to analyze models of (conditional) expected returns. Despite their widespread use, little is known of their statistical properties in contrast to...

We present a semiparametric portfolio optimization method in which portfolio weights are parameterized as a non-linear function of firm characteristics. This approach generalizes the linear parametric portfolio policy of Brandt et al. (2009) and can be applied to high-dimensional problems at a...

This paper develops a two-step semiparametric methodology for portfolio weight selection for characteristics- based factor-tilt and factor-timing investment strategies. We build upon the expected utility maximization framework of Brandt (1999) and Aït-sahalia and Brandt (2001). We assume that...

Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number of hedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selection can be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone, using advanced statistical...