Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...

Momentum is one of the largest and most pervasive market anomalies. However, despite a high mean and Sharpe ratio, momentum suffers from large negative skewness that comes from momentum crash periods. These crashes occur in times of both market stress and market rebound and thus variables that...

Periods of economic turmoil distort the ability of stock prices to reflect the available information. In the last three decades, emerging markets experienced numerous crises. The major three of them are the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-1998), Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009) and Global...

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...

Investing in financial securities inevitably involves risks on the one hand and opportunities on the other hand. This thesis bundles four different studies on risks and/or opportunities in financial markets. In one study, we examine the cross-sectional explanatory power of different...

While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

This paper examines how gambling-motivated trading affects aggregate financial market outcomes. Using a unique global gambling data set covering 39 countries, we show that the dollar volume of stock market gambling is at least 3.5 times the combined volume of “traditional” gambling outlets...

We examine how the Bank of England's quantitative easing (QE) policy during the global financial crisis affected the investment behaviour of insurance companies and pension funds and whether their behaviour was consistent with the operation of the so-called 'portfolio balance channel' that has...

This book is a guide to asset and risk management from a practical point of view. It is centered around two questions triggered by the global events on the stock markets since the middle of the last decade: - Why do crashes happen when in theory they should not? - How do investors deal with such...