An analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finance shows that wealthy investors have a higher return on their stocks than their poorer counterparts. Three key empirical facts emerge: (i) wealthy investors employ more productive search efforts, (ii) financial risk bearing and search efforts are...

In 1995, Benartzi and Thaler introduced the concept myopic loss aversion to explain the equity premium puzzle. They provided empirical evidence to support their arguments. Recently, Durand, et al. criticized this empirical analysis. They propose an approach which not only rejects the...

Superior to the variance, "swap variance (SwV)" summarizes the entire probability distribution of returns and is unbiased to distributional asymmetry. Retaining the same simplicity as mean-variance (MV) model, the efficiency of mean-swap variance (MSwV) is necessary and sufficient conditions for...

In this paper I study the relationship between rationality and asset prices when agents have heterogeneous and incorrect beliefs about future events. Using the fully rational pricing as a benchmark, I show that when agents behave according to the Subjective Generalized Kelly rule (Bottazzi et...

S&P 500 Index option-based volatility indexes have untenable risk-return profiles. These volatility indexes are not designed with consideration of important real-world risk characteristics of options and fail to represent volatility as a differentiated asset-class with relevance to the long-term...

In this short note, we show investors one way to calculate ideal investment sizing by using two rules of thumb based on a simple outline of individual risk aversion. We illustrate these two heuristics, which are not widely appreciated, with thought experiments involving coin flips and ketchup &...

The US Treasury effectively ”owns” about 24% of the stocks held by high income US taxable investors. Through the capital gains tax, Uncle Sam has an effective exposure of more than $1 trillion of equities. And this huge-but-silent investor might be about to get a lot bigger if capital gains...