Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...

We overview different methods of modeling volatility of stock prices and exchange rates, focusing on their ability to reproduce the empirical properties in the corresponding time series. The properties of price fluctuations vary across the time scales of observation. The adequacy of different...