It is well known that non-normality plays an important role in asset and risk management. However, handling a large number of assets has long been a challenge due to the curse of dimensionality. We describe a statistical technique, which we call Moment Component Analysis (MCA), that extends...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosis directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

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...

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. We obtain that for small values of the risk-aversion parameter, non-normality...

The aim of this paper is to compare various methods which extract a Risk Neutral Density (RND) out of PIBOR as well as of Notional interest rate futures options and to investigate how traders react to a political event. We first focus on 5 dates surrounding the 1997 snap election and several...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...