Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...

Investors typically measure an asset’s potential to diversify a portfolio by its correlations with the portfolio’s other assets, but correlation is useful only if it provides a good estimate of how an asset’s returns co-occur cumulatively with the other asset returns over the investor’s...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

We show that the last few components in the principal component analysis of the correlation matrix of a group of stocks may contain useful financial insights by identifying highly correlated pairs or larger groups of stocks. The results of this type of analysis can easily be included in the...

It is well known that non-normality plays an important role in asset and risk management. However, handling a large number of assets has long been a challenge due to the curse of dimensionality. We describe a statistical technique, which we call Moment Component Analysis (MCA), that extends...