This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversfication strategies as applied to a set of 17 years of monthly hedge fund index returns on a set of ten market indices representing 13 major hedge fund categories, as compiled by the EDHEC Risk Institute. The...

We investigate the case for Bordeaux and Rhone wine as an investment. The raw data analysed comprises of approx. 335,000 observations of wine sales prices and is analysed using the repeat sales regression method. General Red Bordeaux and Rhone wine indices are constructed for the period January...

We propose a model of volatility tail behavior, in which the pricing measure dominates the physical measure in both tails of the volatility distribution and, hence, the derived pricing kernel exhibits an increasing and decreasing region in the volatility dimension. The model features investors...

We examine the F score in global emerging markets and show there is a meaningful premium attached to high F score stocks which is unrelated to the size, value and momentum premiums. It is larger for high value stocks, moderately higher for high momentum stocks and unrelated to stock size. This...

This study highlights the link between stock return volatility, operating performance, and stock returns. Prior studies suggest that there is a ‘low volatility' anomaly, where firms with a low stock return volatility out-perform firms with a high stock return volatility. This paper confirms...

We study empirical mean-variance optimization when the portfolio weights are restricted to be direct functions of underlying stock characteristics such as value and momentum. The closed-form solution to the portfolio weights estimator shows that the portfolio problem in this case reduces to a...

We investigate the relation between downside beta and stock returns in a global context using more than 170 million daily return observations. Contrary to the findings in the U.S. equity market, we show that downside beta does not explain the cross-sectional differences in future and...

Do fundamental index funds beat traditional ones? The major companies that offer the new fundamentally indexed international mutual funds are Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), Research Affiliates, and WisdomTree. A major provider of traditional international index funds is DFA. We compare various...

Non-financial performance measures, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) measures, are potentially leading indicators of firms' financial performance. I draw on the prior academic literature and the concept of ESG materiality to develop new corporate governance and ESG...

Analyzing several Developed and Emerging international markets, I test the ability of global, regional, and local models to explain a large set of 134 cross-sectional anomalies. My main finding is that both global and regional factor models create substantially larger average absolute alphas...