Financial derivatives have often been criticized as casino-style betting instruments. It turns out that many naive ways of making them are indeed equivalent to gambling. Fortunately, this inadvertent effect can be understood and prevented. We present a theory of product design which achieves that

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There has been considerable research into dynamic global tactical asset allocation (GTAA) strategies driven by simple measures of Valuation and Momentum applied to a baseline balanced portfolio of equities and fixed income (see Blitz and van Vliet 2008, Wang and Kochard 2011, Gnedenko and Yelnik...

"What are the origins of risks?'' and "How material are they?'' -- these are the two most fundamental questions of any risk analysis. Quantitative Structuring -- a technology for building financial products -- provides economically meaningful answers for both of these questions. It does so by...

The central question addressed in this note is whether it is better to sell (and re-purchase) appreciated assets now and pay today's long-term capital gains tax rate, or wait to realize gains in the future and pay a likely higher capital gains tax rate. The authors argue that a framework based...