It is widely known that the common risk-factors derived from PCA beyond the first eigenportfolio are generally difficult to interpret and thus to use in practical portfolio management. We explore a alternative approach (HPCA) which makes strong use of the partition of the market into sectors. We...

Using NCRIEF farmland and timberland smoothed indices over the period from 1992Q1 to 2012Q3 and a new de-smoothing approach offered by Fisher et al. (1994), we explore the mean-variance diversification features of farmland and timberland assets. Our empirical results show that diversification...

This paper extends Meucci's Effective Number of Bets to general risk measures with heavy-tailed distributions. By diagonalizing the Hessian matrix of a risk measure we are able to extract locally independent marginal contributions to the risk. The Minimal Torsion approach can still be applied to...

This paper analyses the fundamental drivers of risk and return in portfolios of private equity fund investments. We draw on a large data set of 771 mature European and North American primary buyout funds with historic performance information from Preqin covering vintages from 1998-2007. Using...

Exotic options present fund managers with flexibility in constructing a hedge consistent with desired risk and return properties and forward-looking views. However, gaining an understanding of exotic instruments is difficult, particularly since the traditional method of option analysis via...

This paper employs a deep learning approach for linking stock market fundamentals to trading signals via neural networks. With an average accuracy of ~54% the model predicts whether markets go up or down on the subsequent trading day. Coupling the prediction to a binary long/cash strategy yields...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

Common research suggests that investor sentiment is negatively related to future stock returns and positively related to future volatility. I incorporate this idea in the asset allocation process by blending both views on the expected return and the conditional value at risk (CVaR) based on...

This article demonstrates how to directly incorporate common value investing ideas in the portfolio optimization process. Through minimizing the relative entropy, multiple value rankings are merged with the historical return distribution. This approach yields performance improvements both from a...

We propose an asset pricing model with generalized disappointment aversion preferences and long-run volatility risk. With Markov switching fundamentals, we derive closed-form solutions for all returns moments and predictability regressions. The model produces first and second moments of...