This paper investigates the uncertainty about the trading costs associated with a given portfolio strategy. I derive accurate approximations of the ex ante probability distributions of proportional trading costs and portfolio turnover under the conventional assumption of normal asset returns....

A new model class for univariate asset returns is proposed which involves the use of mixtures of stable Paretian distributions, and readily lends itself to use in a multivariate context for portfolio selection. The model nests numerous ones currently in use, and is shown to outperform all its...

In this paper we propose a quasi-shrinkage approach for minimum-variance portfolios which does not use a quadratic loss function to derive the optimal shrinkage intensity. We develop two alternative objective functions for linear shrinkage. The first targets the reduction of portfolio variance....

The mean-variance optimization is one of the standard frameworks used to obtain optimal portfolio weights. This framework requires estimators for the mean vector and the covariance matrix of excess returns. The classical method is to adopt the usual sample estimates for the mean vector and the...

Controlling and managing potential losses is one of the main objective of the Risk Management. Following Ben Ameur and Prigent (2007) and Chen et al. (2008), and extending the first results by Hamidi et al. (2009) when adopting a risk management approach for defining insurance portfolio...

This paper proposes tests of unconditional mean-variance efficiency using bootstrap method that does not depend on specific distributional assumptions. We reject the mean-variance efficiency of the CRSP value-weighted stock index for five of the seven consecutive ten-year subperiods from 1926 to...

This essay presents the most recent results from an on-going research project that collects and analyzes the market prices of patent portfolio transactions. The project was initially launched in 2012 as part of the efforts to better understand the pricing behavior of the rapidly growing patent...

We investigate simply the usage of clustering method by inverse covariance estimation for asset allocation in finance. Allocation across various sectors of the market (i.e. sector ETF) is usually well understood through the usage of mean variance allocation. However, stocks inside a same sector...

Stochastic optimisation has found a fertile ground for applications in finance. One of the greatest challenges remains to incorporate a set of scenarios that accurately models the behaviour of financial markets, and in particular their behaviour during crashes and crises, without sacrificing the...

Investors often adopt mean-variance efficient portfolios for achieving superior risk-adjusted returns. However, such portfolios are sensitive to estimation errors, which affect portfolio performance. To understand the impact of estimation errors, I develop simple and intuitive formulas of the...