When Japanese short-term bond yields were near their zero bound, yields on long-term bonds showed substantial fluctuation, and there was a strong positive relationship between the level of interest rates and yield volatilities/risk premia. We explore whether several families of dynamic term...

Hedge Fund returns are often highly serially correlated mainly due to illiquidity exposures given that investments in such securities tend to be inactively traded and associated market prices are not always readily available. Following that, observed returns of such alternative investments tend...

We develop a multivariate dynamic term structure model, which takes into account the nonlinear (time-varying) relationship between interest rates and the state of the economy. In contrast to the classical term structure literature, where nonlinearities are captured by increasing the number of...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

Classical quantitative finance models such as the Geometric Brownian Motion or its later extensions such as local or stochastic volatility models do not make sense when seen from a physics-based perspective, as they are all equivalent to a negative mass oscillator with a noise. This paper...

We propose a novel way to assess information processing in a complex environment of market fragmentation. We take a different angle from the price discovery literature, and investigate information processing in the stochastic process driving stock's volatility (volatility discovery). We show...

Risk factors and systematic factor strategies are fast becoming an integral part of the global asset management landscape. In this report, we provide an introduction to, and critique of, the factor investing paradigm in a South African setting. We initially discuss the general factor...

This paper quantifies how variation in real economic activity and inflation in the U.S. influenced the market prices of level, slope, and curvature risks in U.S. Treasury markets. We develop a novel arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model in which bond investment decisions are influenced by...

We develop a multivariate dynamic term structure model, which takes into account the nonlinear (time-varying) relation between interest rates and the state of the economy. In contrast to the classical term structure literature, in which nonlinearities are captured by increasing the number of...