We test whether the unconventional monetary policy (UMP) announcements by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank represent a risk factor for the hedge fund industry as a whole and for ten commonly used strategies in particular. Using modified event studies and Markov switching models,...

Among all the emerging markets, the cryptocurrency market is considered the most controversial and simultaneously the most interesting one. The visibly significant market capitalization of cryptos motivates modern financial instruments such as futures and options. Those will depend on the...

Option-implied moments, like implied volatility, contain useful information about an underlying asset's return distribution, but are derived under the risk-neutral probability measure. This paper shows how to convert risk-neutral moments into the corresponding physical ones. The main theoretical...

Inter-temporal risk parity is a strategy that rebalances risky assets and cash in order to target a constant level of ex-ante risk over time. When applied to equities and compared to a buy-and-hold portfolio it is known to improve the Sharpe ratio and reduce drawdowns. We apply inter-temporal...

The paper proposes a framework for large-scale portfolio optimization which accounts for all the major stylized facts of multivariate financial returns, including volatility clustering, dynamics in the dependency structure, asymmetry, heavy tails, and nonellipticity. It introduces a so-called...

We define risk spillover as the dependence of a given asset variance on the past covariances and variances of other assets. Building on this idea, we propose the use of a highly flexible and tractable model to forecast the volatility of an international equity portfolio. According to the risk...

Two basic solutions have been proposed to fix the well-documented incompatibility of the sample covariance matrix with Markowitz mean-variance portfolio optimization: first, restrict leverage so much that no short sales are allowed; or, second, linearly shrink the sample covariance matrix towards...

We evaluate whether machine learning methods can better model excess portfolio returns compared to the standard regression-based strategies generally used in the finance and econometric literature. We examine 17 benchmark factor model specifications based on Expected Utility Theory and theory...

In this paper, we extend the standard Gaussian stochastic-volatility Bayesian VAR by employing the generalized hyperbolic skew Student's t distribution for the innovations. Allowing the skewness parameter to vary over time, our specification permits flexible modelling of innovations in terms of...

This paper investigates the predictive ability of international volatility risk for the daily aggregate Chinese stock market returns. We employ the innovations in implied volatility indices of seven major international markets as our international volatility risk proxies. We find that...