These days it's become convention (reinforced by the media's treatment of wealth) to assess our net worth by tallying up the market value of our financial assets, even though it's more natural and useful to think of our wealth as a stream of dollars over time given the nature of our income and...

The longest bull market in US stock market history is over. Uncertainty over the public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic will keep markets extremely volatile, making it likely we'll touch a wide range of price levels in the months ahead. Amidst such uncertainty, it's a...

Volatility is usually considered as a synonym for risk. Mainstream financial theory states that higher portfolio volatility is translated into higher expected returns while diversification helps eliminate idiosyncratic risks. This leaves us with an apparent anomaly as low-risk (low-beta) stocks...

It is generally said that out-of-the-money call options are expensive and one can ask the question from which moneyness level this is the case. Expensive actually means that the price one pays for the option is more than the discounted average payoff one receives. If so, the option bears a...

The combination of last year’s large sell-off in the financial markets, a challenging macroeconomic environment, and heightened volatility has led institutional investors to reassess their strategic asset allocation. Guiding these reassessments is the central question of how best to fulfill...

We perform an empirical analysis of trading strategies based on the systematic selling of delta hedged options, aiming at capturing the so-called volatility risk premium. We compare the performance across different strikes and maturities, and perform a breakdown of the drivers of performance. We...

Lotteries are a curious phenomenon in financial markets, as they seem to contradict traditional utility models that predict rational behavior under uncertainty. Despite this, lotteries continue to attract the interest of many investors who knowingly or unknowingly trade their expectations of...

The concept of alternative risk premia is an extension of the factor investing approach. Factor investing consists in building long-only equity portfolios, which are directly exposed to common risk factors like size, value or momentum. Alternative risk premia designate non-traditional risk...

Momentum risk premium is one of the most important alternative risk premia. Since it is considered a market anomaly, it is not always well understood. Many publications on this topic are therefore based on backtesting and empirical results. However, some academic studies have developed a...

This article develops a model that takes into account skewness risk in risk parity portfolios. In this framework, asset returns are viewed as stochastic processes with jumps or random variables generated by a Gaussian mixture distribution. This dual representation allows us to show that skewness...