In a financial system, the interconnectedness among entities from investing in common assets (portfolio overlaps) is considered an important channel for the propagation of systemic risk because this interconnectedness can facilitate the contagion of fire sales and lead to widespread sales as...

The idiosyncratic (microscopic) and systemic (macroscopic) components of market structure have been shown to be responsible for the departure of the optimal mean-variance allocation from the heuristic 'equally-weighted' portfolio. In this paper, we exploit clustering techniques derived from...

In terms of regulatory and economic capital, credit risk is the most significant risk faced by banks. We implement a credit risk model - based on publicly available information . with the aim of developing a tool to monitor credit risk in a sample of large and complex banking groups (LCBGs) in...

The NP-hard nature of cardinality constrained mean-variance portfolio optimization problems has led to a variety of different algorithms with varying degrees of success in reaching optimality given limited computational resources and under the presence of strict time constraints in practice. The...

This paper investigates dividend optimization of an insurance corporation under a more realistic model which takes into consideration refinancing or capital injections. The model follows the compound Poisson framework with credit interest for positive reserve, and debit interest for negative...

The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Strategy (KCGIS) is to maximize the expected utility of nal wealth with a logarithmic utility function. This approach dates to Bernoulli's 1738 suggestion of log as the utility function arguing that marginal utility was proportional to the reciprocal of...

Every structure has natural frequencies. Minor shocks in these frequencies can bring down any structure, e.g. a bridge. An Investment Universe also has natural frequencies, characterized by its eigenvectors. A concentration of risks in the direction of any such eigenvector exposes a portfolio to...

In this paper, we propose a method for hedge fund replication using a factor-based model supplemented with a series of risk and return constraints that implicitly target all the moments of the hedge fund return distribution. We use the approach to replicate the monthly returns of ten broad hedge...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...