After reviewing the parametric and scenario-based approaches to risk management, we discuss a methodology to enhance the flexibility of the scenario-based approach. We change the probability of each scenario, and then we compute the ensuing p&l distribution and all relevant statistics such as...

We reexamine long-term abnormal returns for portfolios sorted on governance characteristics. Firms with strong shareholder rights and firms with weak shareholder rights differ from the population of firms and from each other in how they cluster across industries. Using well-specified tests under...

How can we report returns for a swap that has zero value? How can we perform return optimization for a zero-value long-short portfolio? By introducing a suitable "basis", it is possible to extend the definition of returns to leveraged products in such a way that performance attribution and...

When estimating risk from a window of historical observations, the confidence interval is inverse to the number of scenarios used, which is the length of the window. When estimating risk with exponential decay, where the relative weight of each scenario decreases with time, the confidence...

We show how to mix machine learning signals such as kernel smoothing and fuzzy memberships via the Entropy Pooling approach by Meucci (2008). We illustrate a case study, where we overlay an exponentially time-decayed prior to a pseudo-Gaussian kernel that emphasizes market scenarios where...

Expected returns should not only include rewards for accepting the risk of a potential downside loss, but also discounts for potential upside gains. Since investors care differently about upside gains versus downside losses, they require a risk premium for bearing the relative downside risk. We...

Propagating causal stress-tests or contagion on selected risk factors to all the risk drivers is a challenging task. We use Entropy Pooling by Meucci (2008) to address this issue. Our causal stress-tests comprise, but are not restricted to, stress-testing Bayesian networks. We detail the theory...

We extend the Fully Flexible Views generalization of the Black-Litterman approach to effectively handle extreme views on the tails of a distribution. First, we provide a recursive algorithm to process views on the conditional value at risk, which cannot be handled directly by the original...

In the paper we introduce an empirical approximation of the log-optimal investment strategy that guarantees an almost optimal growth rate of investments. The proposed strategy also considers the effects of portfolio rearrangement costs on growth optimality and advises a suboptimal portfolio for...