In the context of modern portfolio theory, we compare the out-of-sample performance of 8 investment strategies which are based on statistical methods with the out-of-sample performance of a family of trivial strategies. A wide range of approaches is considered in this work, including the...

We re-examined the seasonal pattern in the excess returns of highly visible American firms. In contrast to the seasonality for risky, less visible firms, we found that highly visible stocks display return seasonality that shows the opposite trend. Fund managers are prone to gamesmanship, putting...

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and non-equity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in...

We use supervisory data to investigate risk taking in the U.S. syndicated loan market at a time when longer-term interest rates are exceptionally low, and we study the ex-ante credit risk of loans acquired by different types of lenders, including banks and shadow banks. We find that insurance...

This paper focuses on the issue of limited financial market participation and determines a lower bound on the level of fixed transaction costs that are required to reconcile observed portfolio choices with asset returns within an isoelastic utility framework. The bound is determined from the set...

Several explanations for the observed limited stock market participation have been offered in the literature. One of the most promising one is the presence of market frictions mostly in the form of fixed entry and/or transaction costs. Empirical studies strongly point to a significant structural...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

We examine stock return predictability of "Out-of-The-Money (OTM) put-to-OTM call trading volume ratio" (OTMPC). Our numerical analysis predicts that informed investors hardly write OTM options because the leverage effect is not sufficient to compensate for transaction costs. OTMPC, thus,...

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze the impact of transaction costs in portfolio optimization in Peru. The study aims to compare the transaction costs structure applied in Peru with respect to the ones applied in the USA, and over a few dimensions.Design/methodology/approach – The paper...

An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent's preferences for information. The index of information...