In this paper, we study the risk-return performance of 23 Ishares country index funds in the U.S. during the May 19, 2008-March 9, 2009 bear market and the March 9, 2009-January 19, 2010 bull market. Our findings with the Sharpe and Treynor portfolio performance measures indicate that the...

During the October 9, 2007-March 9, 2009 period, the U.S. stock market experienced the worst bear market in its history since the Great Depression. Empirical studies show that exchange-traded country index funds can provide portfolio diversification benefits to investors in bull markets....

The majority of risk adjusted performance measures (RAPM) currently in use – e.g., Treynor ratio, (?/?)) ratio, Omega index, RoVaR, ‘coherent’ preference criteria, etc. – are incompat- ible with any sensible utility function and would be best avoided. We argue instead for the assessment...

Generalizations of traditional preference criteria such as the Sharpe ratio, the information ratio and the Jensen alpha are obtained by maximizing a certain equivalent excess return (CER) under relevant investment conditions. They are increasing functions of CERs and therefore equivalent...

We propose a performance measure that generalizes the Sharpe ratio. The new performance measure is monotone with respect to stochastic dominance and consistently accounts for mean, variance and higher moments of the return distribution. It is equivalent to the Sharpe ratio if returns are...

Assuming a non-satiable risk-averse investor, the standard approach to portfolio selection suggests discarding of all ineffi cient investment in terms of mean return and its standard deviation ratio within its fi rst step. However, in literature we can fi nd many alternative dispersion and risk...

This paper proposes a new dividend-based S&P 500 Index return predictor, the implied dividend yield term structure (IDYTS). We show that the IDYTS is a “cleaner” predictor than its conventional counterpart, the dividend price ratio (DP), in that the expected return is a linear combination...

Most research on the performance and risk of hedge funds are based on calculations that just use the data from one index provider. Also most product providers and even more and more investors are using hedge fund indices for benchmarking purposes. As some academic articles pointed out, the world...