Standard Monte Carlo methods can often be significantly improved with the addition of appropriate variance reduction techniques. In this paper a new and powerful variance reduction technique is presented. The method is based directly on the Ito calculus and is used to find unbiased variance...

The paper presents a consistent approach to the modeling of general and specific market risk as defined in regulatory documents. It compares the statistically based beta-factor model with a class of benckmark models that use a broadly based index as major building block for modeling. The...

This paper identifies a distribution, which fits the daily log-returns of index benchmarked share prices. For this data the Student t distribution appears to provide the best fit under the maximum likelihood ratio test within the class of symmetric generalised hyperbolic distributions. A share...

The paper discusses various roles that the growth optimal portfolio (GOP) plays in finance. For the case of a continuous market we show how the GOP can be interpreted as a fundamental building block in financial market modeling, portfolio optimisation, contingent claim pricing and risk...

Purpose – This paper aims to construct and compare various total-return world stock indices based on daily data. Design/methodology/approach – Because of diversification, these indices are noticeably similar. A diversification theorem identifies any diversified portfolio as a proxy for the...

A financial market model where agents trade using realistic combinations of buy-and-hold strategies is considered. Minimal assumptions are made on the discounted asset-price process - in particular, the semimartingale property is not assumed. Via a natural market viability assumption, namely,...

This paper demonstrates the usefulness and importance of the concept of honest times to financial modeling. It studies a financial market with asset prices that follow jump-diffusions with negative jumps. The central building block of the market model is its growth optimal portfolio (GOP), which...

The Dybvig-Ingersoll-Ross (DIR) theorem states that, in arbitrage-free term structure models, long-term yields and forward rates can never fall. We present a refined version of the DIR theorem, where we identify the reciprocal of the maturity date as the maximal order that long-term rates at...

In a financial market model, we consider variations of the problem of minimizing the expected time to upcross a certain wealth level. For exponential Levy markets, we show the asymptotic optimality of the growth-optimal portfolio for the above problem and obtain tight bounds for the value...