This paper presents the results of an empirical study concerning conventional and socially responsible mutual funds.We apply a sophisticated operations research algorithm embedded in inverse portfolio optimization on financial market data, ESG-scores and CRSP fund data. Due to our results we...

Academic and practitioner research has presented strong evidence in support of the addition of commodity futures contracts to a diversified stock portfolio to enhance the risk-return characteristics of the portfolio. Moreover, it is well documented that diversification among risky assets in a...

Increasing correlation among international equity markets has prompted investors to seek new investment opportunities. To shed light on this issue for U.S. investors, this paper measures economic benefits of international equity diversification using mean-variance and higher-moments frameworks...

Despite foreign reserves' strategic asset allocation relies mainly on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the unique characteristics of central banks obliges them to articulate and reconcile typical optimization procedures with reserves' management objectives such as providing confidence regarding...

Every structure has natural frequencies. Minor shocks in these frequencies can bring down any structure, e.g. a bridge. An Investment Universe also has natural frequencies, characterized by its eigenvectors. A concentration of risks in the direction of any such eigenvector exposes a portfolio to...

Portfolio optimisation for a Fund of Hedge Funds (“FoHF”) has to address the asymmetric, non-Gaussian nature of the underlying returns distributions. Furthermore, the objective functions and constraints are not necessarily convex or even smooth. Therefore traditional portfolio optimisation...

This paper analyzes the performance of index-based portfolios across developed, emerging, and frontier markets. Besides considering stocks and bonds for portfolio construction, we investigate how investment opportunity sets are enlarged when credit default swaps (CDSs) are added into portfolios...

Optimization of international securitized real estate portfolios has been a key topic for several decades. However, most previous analysis has focused on regional diversification by applying the traditional mean-variance (MV) framework suggested by Markowitz (1952) even if the limitations of...

Offshore assets present investors with an increased investment universe and additional opportunities for reward, but embedded exposure to exchange rates can result in additional risk. In this work, we consider a global equity portfolio of five equity indices (US, Japan, Europe, UK and Canada),...

This paper investigates tactical investment strategies for investors to survive financial crises. Compared with the buy-and-hold strategy, the buy-and-sell strategy is much more effective in mitigating downside risk before, during, and after a crisis by restricting the left-tail volatility of...