Ever since Harry Markowitz published his seminal paper on portfolio selection, investors have incorporated estimates of future volatilities and correlations into their asset allocation process. While portfolio construction methods continue to evolve, many investors continue to forecast...

In recent years both equity and bond markets have been afflicted by high volatility. In order to build up a portfolio on a quantitative basis, several models may be used, such as minimum variance portfolio or equally weighted portfolio. In 2008/09 another way to deal with diversification came...

In this article we derive risk-neutral option price formulas for both plain-vanilla and exotic electricity futures derivatives on the basis of diverse arithmetic multi-factor Ornstein-Uhlenbeck spot price models admitting seasonality, while – in order to avoid “information...

In this paper we extend the methodology of our earlier work (Papailias and Thomakos, 2011) on a modified moving average technical trading rule by allowing short sales. We show how short sales change the trading rule which now acts as a dynamic trailing "stop-and-reverse", instead of a dynamic...

This paper proposes a modified version of the widely used price and moving average cross-over trading strategies. The suggested approach (presented in its 'long only' version) is a combination of cross-over 'buy' signals and a dynamic threshold value which acts as a dynamic trailing stop. The...

Solvency Capital Requirements – or SCR – are the key numbers of Pillar I of Solvency II. Any company concerned (e.g. an insurer) must calculate a capital according to its liabilities and its assets. The resulting number gives the theoretical level of capital that provides the solvency and...

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), as developed by Markowitz (1952) and others, is often described as a nice but impractical theory. The full MPT framework is very sensitive to parameters like the expected returns which are estimated with errors, resulting in allocations with even larger errors....

This study establishes necessary conditions for Almost Stochastic Dominance criteria of various orders. These conditions take the form of restrictions on algebraic combinations of moments of the probability distributions in question. The relevant set of conditions depends on the relevant order...

The first part of this thesis aims to analyse the weaknesses of capitalization-based indexing methods and compares different weighting strategies, which are dedicated to alleviate the conspicuous flaws. At the present day, these alternative portfolio construction schemes are popularly labelled...

Return chasing is often cited as one of the primary behavioral foibles of investors, resulting in sub-par returns. Surprisingly, the literature does not provide a generally accepted and testable description of return chasing. This paper proposes a simple definition. It then describes how return...