Many financial decisions, such as portfolio allocation, risk management, option pricing and hedge strategies, are based on forecasts of the conditional variances, covariances and correlations of financial returns. The paper shows an empirical comparison of several methods to predict...

Predictions about the future are commonly evaluated through statistical tests. As shown by recent literature, many known tests are subject to adverse selection problems and cannot discriminate between forecasters who are competent and forecasters who are uninformed but predict strategically. We...

This paper presents the theoretical and applicative model elaborated by Harry Markowitz on the determination of the structure of the efficient securities portfolio. In this sense, in order to determine the structure of the efficient Markowitz portfolio (PE), a Lagrange function is built and...

The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative and qualitative critical analyse regarding the three important aspects of stock market evolution. First, the forecasting problems are presented and analyse in order to establish the main problems and the potential solutions. Second, the...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

Employing both the mean-variance framework and the common portfolio risk-optimization, this study adds to the investment research by examining how ideal holdings for emerging and frontier markets (EFM) of the four global regions (Asian, Europe, and Commonwealth of Independent States (Eastern +...

This paper develops a dynamic portfolio selection model incorporating economic uncertainty for business cycles. It is assumed that the financial market at each point in time is defined by a hidden Markov model, which is characterized by the overall equity market returns and volatility. The risk...