In the past, assessment of the reasonableness of municipal bond markups depended on anecdotal recollection of markups and subjective judgment about what was customary. Interested parties including regulators can now use the MSRB's EMMA service to determine the markups charged on a set of...

We analyze and value dual directional structured products -- or simply dual directionals (DDs). We find that DDs can be broadly organized into two categories: single observation dual directionals (SODDs) and knock-out dual directionals (KODDs). We determine the appropriate option decomposition...

The daily returns on leveraged and inverse-leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) are a multiple of the daily returns of a reference index. Because LETFs rebalance their leverage daily, their holding period returns can deviate substantially from the returns of a leveraged investment. While...

This paper incorporates risk-based margin requirements into portfolio liquidation procedures in a novel fashion. The approach is analytic and, as a result, more efficient than conventional numerical liquidation methods. The margin requirement calculation is a self-contained inner optimization...