With 30% of the world's investment grade sovereign bonds trading at sub-zero yields, there is a growing acceptance that negative interest rates are the 'new normal.' Even very low probabilities of sustained negative interest rates in the future leads to incredibly high Expected Values for...

Benjamin Franklin's original maxim found in Poor Richard's Almanac was actually "A penny saved is two pence clear" rather than the more commonly known "A penny saved is a penny earned." We believe he was getting at the notion that one risk-free penny is worth two pennies of expected but...

Increasingly, professional forecasters and academic researchers present model-based and subjective or judgment-based forecasts in economics which are accompanied by some measure of uncertainty. In its most complete form this measure is a probability density function for future values of the...

For US investors, international equity exposure has never been so readily available at such a low cost. Nonetheless, surveys indicate US investors typically allocate 80–85% of their equity holdings to US equities, much higher than their proportion of global market value. In this note we...

Investors are periodically challenged with this question: with funds ready to invest, but faced with a market that is generally perceived to be expensive, is it better to wait for a market correction before investing? Many investors are certain that a correction must be around the corner, and...

This paper studies stochastic conditional duration models with a mixture of distribution processes for financial asset's transaction data. The mixture component distributions include exponential, gamma and Weibull. The models allow for a correlation between the observed durations and the...

This paper extends a stochastic conditional duration (SCD) model for financial transaction data to allow for correlation between error processes or innovations of observed duration process and latent log duration process with the aim of improving the statistical fit of the model. Suitable...

When a benchmark model is inefficient, including additional assets to the benchmark portfolios can improve its performance. In reality, however, the efficiency of a benchmark model relative to a given set of test assets is ex ante unknown, and the optimal portfolio is constructed based on...

You're probably familiar, at least in passing, with the 'convexity' of long-term bonds - i.e. that yields dropping 1% produce a bigger price move than yields rising 1%. A significant amount of brainpower has gone into understanding all the ramifications of this convexity in the fixed income...