With a risk-return perspective, this work presents an original framework enfolding several profit & loss diagrams for a variety of option strategies to be employed in the short-term, either for hedging or for speculative purposes. This work also discusses performance evaluation of several...

Tail risk is usually an important consideration for investors, and a desire to limit catastrophic loss has led to significant interest in protection strategies. Across four distinct market periods surrounding the COVID pandemic, we explore three common tail-risk mitigation strategies (1) a long...

In this paper, a continuous-time, structural model of a dealer-bank is presented to derive fair value equations for credit-risky financial products that are not perfectly hedged. The impact these contracts have on the dealer-bank's earnings volatility, and consequently, their solvency and...

In the data, stock market volatility negatively predicts short-run equity and variance risk premia, at odds with leading asset pricing models. I show that only infrequent large volatility shocks negatively drive risk premia, whereas the predictability is strongly positive at all other times. I...

Prior research and empirical investment results demonstrate that strategy performance can be highly sensitive to rebalance schedules, an effect called rebalance timing luck (“RTL”). In this paper we extend the empirical analysis to option-based strategies. As a case study, we replicate a...

This essay looks at the bidirectional relationship between financial history and financial economics. It begins by giving a brief history of financial economics by outlining the main topics of interest to financial economists. It then documents and explains the increasing influence of financial...

This essay looks at the bidirectional relationship between financial history and financial economics. It begins by giving a brief history of financial economics by outlining the main topics of interest to financial economists. It then documents and explains the increasing influence of financial...

This paper shows that changes in market participants' fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and...

Using the pandemic as a laboratory, we show that asset markets assign a time- varying price to firms' disaster risk exposure. In 2020 the cross-section of realized and expected stock returns reflected firms' different exposure to the pandemic, as measured by their vulnerability to social...