Continuously rebalanced long-short trades are similar to highly levered trades in that their PNL profile depends not only on the final distribution of return, but also on the realized co-variance structure of the asset pair. It's easily possible for both orientations of a rebalanced long-short...

The looming Savings Crisis is usually attributed to people either not saving enough or making poor investment choices, but we believe there's another culprit. Many investors could benefit from a 'free lunch' of pooling their longevity risk with others, but due to market inefficiencies, they do...

We are often asked for our estimate of the long-term return of the equity market. Our framework currently indicates 5.3% above inflation for global equities, which we know strikes many investors as high. This is understandable, given that the most available and frequently cited valuation ratio...

We steer our financial course through life choosing how much to spend and how to invest what's left, periodically updating our choices as circumstances evolve. This is the essence of financial planning: specifying in advance a desired spending and investment policy conditional on relevant...

March 2020 packed 2 ½ years of normal U.S. stock market volatility into one month, making it the most volatile month on record. Daily variability clocked in at 6%, six times higher than the average over the past 90 years. How should an investor respond to such volatility? In this article we...

In this short note, we show investors one way to calculate ideal investment sizing by using two rules of thumb based on a simple outline of individual risk aversion. We illustrate these two heuristics, which are not widely appreciated, with thought experiments involving coin flips and ketchup &...

What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given $25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61 young, quantitatively trained men and women to play this...

We develop theoretical underpinnings of pairwise random matching processes. We formalize the mechanics of matching, and study the links between properties of the different processes and trade frictions. A particular emphasis is placed on providing a mapping between matching technologies and...

We develop a general procedure to construct pairwise meeting processes characterized by two features. First, in each period the process maximizes the number of matches in the population. Second, over time agents meet everybody else exactly once. We call this type of meetings “absolute...