The practical implications of modern portfolio theory (MPT) are obscured by more than 50 years of academic literature. We shed light on the literature by picking out the few most important implications of MPT. We argue first that what we dub the “Markowitz uncertainty principle” implies that...

We first wrote and circulated our “Rookie's Guide” paper about the academic labor market for newly minted finance PhDs twenty years ago. It passed hand-to-hand and via photocopies of photocopies sent using snail mail (or, back then, we just called it ‘mail'). Since then, much has changed...

I have collected together 10 results concerning marginal distributions, joint distributions, univariate normality, bivariate normality, correlation and independence. Some of these results are well known, but some are relatively unknown. My experience has been that no single source presents more...

How accurately can final-year students majoring in statistics, physics, and finance label the vertical axis of a normal distribution, explain their label, identify units, and answer a question about the impact of horizontal-axis rescaling? Our survey finds that only 27 out of 148 students...

For two decades, researchers and practitioners alike have argued that constraining stock prices to eights of a dollar is unnecessarily restrictive. It has repeatedly been suggested that a smaller tick size would narrow bid-ask spreads and increase volume, and that in lower priced stocks the...

We provide a new pathway to the derivation of a half-dozen statistical results under standard assumptions, including key results due to Student and Fisher. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first new derivations of these results in 75 years. Our work links two seemingly disparate...

We derive a simple expression for the sensitivity of duration, convexity, and higher-order bond risk measures to changes in term structure shape parameters. Our analysis enables fixed income portfolio managers to capture the combined effects of term structure level, slope, and curvature shifts...

The dramatic increase in the importance of U.S. dividends since 2001 means that financial analysts may soon demand access to updated dividend discount models (DDMs). To address this need, we introduce a new “super annuity formula” that can be used in the modular construction of...

Limit order markets are a common method for trading stocks based on the use of a limit order book to represent buy and sell orders. The issue of market manipulation is a fundamental concern both in terms of market integrity and the ability to detect manipulation cases by market authorities. This...