It is well known that strategies that allow investors to allocate their wealth using return and volatility forecasts, the use of which are termed market and volatility timing, are of significant value. In this paper, we show that distribution timing, defined here as the ability to use forecasts...

Gram-Charlier expansions have became popular in Finance as an improvement over the normality assumption. The reason is that in Gram-Charlier expansions, parameters appear which directly control the skewness and kurtosis. Those expansions, of polynomial nature, have the unfortunate drawback of...

The entropy principle yields, for a given set of moments, a density that involves the smallest amount of prior information. We first show how entropy densities may be constructed in a numerically efficient way as the minimization of a potential. Next, for the case where the first four moments...

In this study we compare the quality and information content of risk neutral densities obtained by various methods. We consider a non-parametric method based on a mixture of log-normal densities, the semi-parametric ones based on an Hermite approximation of Madan and Milne, or based on an...

We evaluate how deviations from normality may affect the allocation of assets. A Taylor expansion of expected utility allows us to focus on certain moments and to compute numerically the optimal portfolio allocation. A decisive advantage of our approach is that it remains operational even if a...

In this study we compare the quality and information content of risk neutral densities obtained by various methods. We consider a non-structural method, based on a mixture of log-normal densities, and the semi-nonparametric ones, based on an Hermite approximation of Abken, Madan, Milne, and...