There is extensive empirical evidence that funds of hedge funds (FoHFs) quickly change their investment bets as a function of the changing market conditions. In this chapter, we first analyze the stability of risk exposure and performance of FoHFs during the period January 2005-June 2011. We...

Risk budgets are frequently used to estimate and allocate the risk of a portfolio by decomposing the total portfolio risk into the risk contribution of each component position. Many approaches to portfolio allocation use ex post methods for constructing risk budgets and take the variance as a...

In recent years, the market share of socially responsible investment funds has rapidly increased. This has sparked interest of academics and practitioners for the impact of single stock sustainability screening on portfolio performance. Besides eliminating non sustainable assets from the...

We investigate the effect of market liquidity on equity-collateralized funding accounting for endogeneity. Theory suggests market liquidity can affect funding liquidity in stabilizing and destabilizing manners. Using the average fee on stock loans as a proxy for equity-collateralized funding...

RiskPortfolios is an R package for constructing risk-based portfolios. It provides a set of functionalities to build mean-variance, minimum variance, inverse-volatility weighted (Leote De Carvalho, Lu, and Moulin (2012)), equal-risk-contribution (Maillard, Roncalli, and Teïletche (2010)),...

This research note describes the construction of news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) indices for Flanders, Wallonia and Belgium. The indices are computed from January 2001 until May 2020. Important domestic and more global events coincide with spikes in the indices. The COVID-19...

Shariah law prohibits investments in equities of companies for which interest income is a considerable source of revenue. In practice this is often enforced by prohibiting investments in firms for which the reported interest-based revenues exceed a predetermined percentage of the firm's total...

The technical conversion factor (TCF) is a survey-based estimate of the percentage of carcass weight obtained per unit of live weight. Practitioners and researchers have used it to predict the corresponding price ratio. We use both in-sample regressions and out-of-sample forecasting analysis to...

Modern calculation of textual sentiment involves a myriad of choices for the actual calibration. We introduce a general sentiment engineering framework that optimizes the design for forecasting purposes. It includes the use of the elastic net for sparse data-driven selection and weighting of...

We perform a large-scale empirical study to compare the forecasting performance of single-regime and Markov-switching GARCH (MSGARCH) models from a risk management perspective. We find that, for daily, weekly, and ten-day equity log-returns, MSGARCH models yield more accurate Value-at-Risk,...