This paper is the second examination of asset allocation from the EBRI IRA Database. The EBRI IRA Database is an ongoing project of the Employee Benefit Research Institute that currently contains information on 14.85 million accounts of 11.1 million unique individuals with total assets of $1.002...

This research investigates whether the financial literacy of individuals influences risk taking decisions and diversification behavior. This issue is relevant in that investors are increasingly in charge of their own financial security, but they have to deal with financial instruments whose...

The study investigates the mutual funds investment style in the Jordanian context. It uses monthly returns of five mutual funds from July 2000 to December 2009. To do so, it employs the 4-factors model with explanatory variables the market portfolio return, a small minus large capitalization...

Despite the recent spike in cross-asset class correlations, commodities remain an asset class set apart by distinct risk factors that may enhance the diversification of traditional portfolios. Their superior performance relative to equities and fixed income in times of rising inflation may also...

Pairs trading is a very common trading strategy, and being able to obtain parameters that tell us when to trade and when to get out is of great importance. In this paper I propose a methodology that can improve the performance of traditional pairs trading strategy. I use stochastic beam search...

This report is a brief of the actual research and discusses two ways of asset allocation in Hedge Funds to generate alpha over the fund of hedge funds. The fund of hedge funds have fallen out of favour for investors seeking alternative investments as they have lagged the general market returns....

We build a new measure of investor sentiment only based on changes in diversification levels of individual investors' portfolios. The dynamics of the number of different stocks in portfolios is modelized as a Markov chain. We measure investor sentiment as the area above the cumulative...

This paper employs subjective stock market expectation responses from Health and Retirement Survey as a proxy for stock market optimism of American households. I first ask if individuals are inert in terms of forming their optimistic stock market views. Second I analyze the impact of optimism on...

This paper proposes a structural approach to long-horizon asset allocation. In particular, the investor draws inferences about asset returns from a vector autoregression (VAR) with economic restrictions on the intercept, slope, and covariance matrix implied by the long-run risk model of Bansal...

Value investors generally characterize themselves as the grown ups in the investment world, unswayed by perceptions or momentum, and driven by fundamentals. While this may be true, at least in the abstract, there are at least three distinct strands of value investing. The first, passive value...