We propose a solution to the Closed-End Fund Puzzle in financial markets without a free lunch with vanishing risk. Our results are consistent with both the time-series and the cross-sectional aspect of the Closed-End Fund Puzzle. It turns out that a closed-end fund cannot be created if the fund...

Two shrinkage estimators for the global minimum variance portfolio that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return are derived. The presented results hold for any number of observations n = d 2 and number of assets d = 4. The...

Ellsberg's famous thought experiments demonstrate that most people prefer less ambiguous alternatives to more ambiguous ones. This apparently violates Savage's Sure-thing Principle. I provide a solution to Ellsberg's paradox. More precisely, I demonstrate that ambiguity aversion can be readily...

In the present work, I derive the risk functions of 5 standard estimators for expected asset returns which are frequently advocated in the literature, viz the sample mean vector, the James-Stein and Bayes-Stein estimator, the minimum-variance estimator, and the CAPM estimator. I resolve the...

We develop a general approach to portfolio optimization taking account of estimation risk and stylized facts of empirical finance. This is done within a Bayesian framework. The approximation of the posterior distribution of the unknown model parameters is based on a parallel tempering algorithm....

Traditional portfolio optimization has often been criticized for not taking estimation risk into account. Estimation risk is mainly driven by the parameter uncertainty regarding the expected asset returns rather than their variances and covariances. The global minimum variance portfolio has been...

We propose the outperformance probability as a new performance measure, which can be used in order to compare a strategy with a specified benchmark, and develop the basic statistical properties of its maximum-likelihood estimator in a Brownian-motion framework. The given results are used to...

In forecasting count processes, practitioners often ignore the discreteness of counts and compute forecasts based on Gaussian approximations instead. For both central and non-central point forecasts, and for various types of count processes, the performance of such approximate point forecasts is...