Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

With the advent in recent years of large financial data sets, machine learning and high-performance computing, analysts can backtest millions (if not billions) of alternative investment strategies. Backtest optimizers search for combinations of parameters that maximize the simulated historical...

In this paper I examine whether one can use analyst forecasts of macroeconomic variables to improve investors ex-ante allocation of wealth between stocks and bonds. Such forecasts provide a forward-looking approach which I find improves investor's information set for the myopic stock-bond...

Correlation matrices are ubiquitous in finance. Some key applications include portfolio construction, risk management, and factor/style analysis. Correlation matrices are usually estimated from historical empirical observations or derived from historically estimated factors. It is widely...

We prove that high simulated performance is easily achievable after backtesting a relatively small number of alternative strategy configurations, a practice we denote “backtest overfitting”. The higher the number of configurations tried, the greater is the probability that the backtest is...

Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2016) “argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.” Surprisingly, their false discovery rate (FDR) estimates suggest most are true. I revisit their results by developing non- and semi-parametric FDR estimators that account for...

This paper shows that currency momentum, which cannot be explained by carry and dollar factors, summarizes the autocorrelation of these factors. Carry and dollar factors are strongly autocorrelated and only earn significantly positive excess returns following positive factor returns. Currency...

In this paper we introduce a new class of approaches to empirical asset pricing research, namely LASSO methods augmented by further penalties related to differences in adjacent coefficient estimates (at t and t+1) for a given characteristic. The economic motivation for this is that the...

In this paper, we provide evidence on two alternative mechanisms of interaction between returns and volatilities: the leverage effect and the volatility feedback effect. We stress the importance of distinguishing between realized volatility and implied volatility, and find that implied...

Availability of high frequency data has improved the capability of computing volatility in an efficient way. Nevertheless, measuring volatility/covariance from the observation of the asset price is challenging for two main reasons: observed asset prices are generally affected by noise...