This paper examines and compares several standard financial structured products whose performance is based on smoothing the return of an underlying asset (e.g. financial market indices, baskets of stocks). The returns of such products are based on various averages of intermediate values of the...

In this article, we show that performance attribution considered alone can be misleading. Indeed, a portfolio manager who knows perfectly the distribution of asset's returns and who performs a relative portfolio optimization according to that information, may be penalized in some of her choices...

Leveraged and inverse ETFs are designed to achieve a multiple exposure (positive or negative, e.g., 2x or -2x) of some index returns on a daily basis. Recently, some controversy surrounding leveraged ETFs has appeared in the U.S. market and focused mainly on the performance results delivered by...

In a recent paper, Lo (2002) derives the asymptotic distribution of the Sharpe ratio under several sets of assumptions for the return-generating process. In this paper, we extend his work to the information ratio (IR), the ratio of the excess return of a portfolio over his benchmark to its...

Among leveraged funds, leveraged ETFs are designed to achieve multiple exposure (e.g., twice) to some financial index returns, on a daily basis. In this paper, we derive an analytical expression for the value process of a leveraged ETF. We analyze it as a convex constant allocation portfolio...

The purpose of this article is to introduce, analyze and compare two performance participation methods based on a portfolio consisting of two risky assets: Option-Based Performance Participation (OBPP) and Constant Proportion Performance Participation (CPPP). In contrast to standard portfolio...

Performance measures such as the Sharpe ratio and the information ratio are estimation subject to estimation error. Lo (2002) derives the explicit expressions for the statistical distribution of the Sharpe ratio. Bertrand and Protopopescu (2007) have extended his work to the bivariate case which...