Risk parity is an asset allocation strategy designed so each asset class contributes equally to overall portfolio risk (as measured by volatility). While risk parity offers potential advantages, its success hinges on key assumptions and a favorable environment for bonds. Like the traditional...

Over the years, Institute research has shown active managers, even the best-performing ones, suffered periods of weak returns relative to benchmarks and their peers. But underperformance, up to three years, had relatively little impact on the best-performing funds' ability to deliver success...

Americans are rapidly losing their pensions — replaced by savings plans disguised as retirement plans.Many sponsors view defined contribution (DC) plans as the best option for retaining some of the features of a pension plan without bearing all of the costs and risks of DB. This paper explores...

Accounting measures are traditionally considered not significant from an economic point of view. In particular, accounting rates of return are often regarded economically meaningless or, at the very best, poor surrogates for the IRR, which is held to be “the” economic yield. Likewise,...

We compare the concept of Economic Value Added (EVA) with the traditional Discounted Cash Flows (DCF) method of investment appraisal. We find that DCF suffers from dynamic inconsistency and may approve suboptimal investment decisions. In contrast, EVA does not suffer from these shortcomings and...

This paper extends the Goetzmann, Ingersoll, and Ross (2003) model to the case of partial information, where the expected return of a hedge fund is not observable but known to be either high or low. The fund manager can dynamically update his belief about the true value of the expected return...

We show in a fairly general setting of a buyer and seller with the same preferences trading two related assets so as to share volatility risk that illiquidity and virtually all impediments to trade cannot be priced. This is because the buying and selling counterparties must both be optimizing....

This paper analyzes the relations among different concepts such as earnings, profit, interest, rate, consumption, dividend, installment, cash flow, capital. It aims at embracing these notions in a unique conceptual 'umbrella,' consisting of five perspectives: (1) accounting, (2) economic theory,...

This paper presents a proposal for evaluating real options. The existing models are not widely used by corporate managers as they are formally complex, rather difficult to understand and rest on strong implicit assumptions. We propose a possible alternative by using a fuzzy expert system that...

This paper makes use of a fuzzy expert system to evaluate a strategic investment. In particular, the model proposed aims at replicating the actual decision process accomplished by Florim S.p.a., an Italian ceramic tile firm which recently had the opportunity of buying a firm in the USA. The...