Scenarios for Risk Management and Global Investment Strategies


Book Description

This book discusses scenarios for risk management and developing global investment strategies. What are the chances that various future events will occur over time and how should these events and probable occurrence influence investment decisions? Assessing all possible outcomes is fundamental to risk management, financial engineering and investment and hedge fund strategies. A careful consideration of future scenarios will lead to better investment decisions and avoid financial disasters. The book presents tools and case studies around the world for analyzing a wide variety of investment strategies, building scenarios to optimize returns.




Scenario Analysis in Risk Management


Book Description

This book focuses on identifying and explaining the key determinants of scenario analysis in the context of operational risk, stress testing and systemic risk, as well as management and planning. Each chapter presents alternative solutions to perform reliable scenario analysis. The author also provides technical notes and describes applications and key characteristics for each of the solutions. In addition, the book includes a section to help practitioners interpret the results and adjust them to real-life management activities. Methodologies, including those derived from consensus strategies, extreme value theory, Bayesian networks, Neural networks, Fault Trees, frequentist statistics and data mining are introduced in such a way as to make them understandable to readers without a quantitative background. Particular emphasis is given to the added value of the implementation of these methodologies.




Quantitative Financial Risk Management


Book Description

A Comprehensive Guide to Quantitative Financial Risk Management Written by an international team of experts in the field, Quantitative Financial Risk Management: Theory and Practice provides an invaluable guide to the most recent and innovative research on the topics of financial risk management, portfolio management, credit risk modeling, and worldwide financial markets. This comprehensive text reviews the tools and concepts of financial management that draw on the practices of economics, accounting, statistics, econometrics, mathematics, stochastic processes, and computer science and technology. Using the information found in Quantitative Financial Risk Management can help professionals to better manage, monitor, and measure risk, especially in today's uncertain world of globalization, market volatility, and geo-political crisis. Quantitative Financial Risk Management delivers the information, tools, techniques, and most current research in the critical field of risk management. This text offers an essential guide for quantitative analysts, financial professionals, and academic scholars.




The Ivy Portfolio


Book Description

A do-it-yourself guide to investing like the renowned Harvard and Yale endowments. The Ivy Portfolio shows step-by-step how to track and mimic the investment strategies of the highly successful Harvard and Yale endowments. Using the endowment Policy Portfolios as a guide, the authors illustrate how an investor can develop a strategic asset allocation using an ETF-based investment approach. The Ivy Portfolio also reveals a novel method for investors to reduce their risk through a tactical asset allocation strategy to protect them from bear markets. The book will also showcase a method to follow the smart money and piggyback the top hedge funds and their stock-picking abilities. With readable, straightforward advice, The Ivy Portfolio will show investors exactly how this can be accomplished—and allow them to achieve an unparalleled level of investment success in the process. With all of the uncertainty in the markets today, The Ivy Portfolio helps the reader answer the most often asked question in investing today - "What do I do"?




Shock Markets


Book Description

Don't fear crises: use them as opportunities to make money! Shock Markets shows traders and investors exactly how to do it -- with exceptional detail, not vague handwaving. Robert Webb and Alexander Webb offer meticulous breakdowns of recent crises, revealing how they impacted both individual stocks and the market as a whole -- and helping you create detailed game plans for profiting from future shocks. By fusing real-life trading examples with rigorous moment-by-moment analysis of price changes, they give you tools to survive and thrive in even the most volatile markets. This accessible, actionable book answers crucial questions like: What moves stock prices? What moves the overall market? How can you profit from understanding catalysts that precipitate sudden sharp changes in stock prices? From the actions of corporate executives to regulatory decisions, earnings announcements to merger deals, lawsuits to settlements, macroeconomic reports to the policy actions of foreign governments, seemingly remote factors can have a huge, sudden impact on stocks in today's interconnected markets. Shock Markets illuminates these catalysts, and demonstrates their shifting behavior during fads, fashions, bubbles, crashes, and market crises. The focus is completely practical: helping savvy traders uncover profit where others find only peril.




Optimizing the Aging, Retirement, and Pensions Dilemma


Book Description

A straightforward guide focused on life cycle investing-namely aging, retirement, and pensions Life cycle investing and the implications of aging, retirement, and pensions continues to grow in importance. With people living longer, the relative and absolute number of retirees is growing while the number of workers contributing to pension funds is declining. This reliable resource develops a detailed economic analysis-at the micro (individual) and macro (economy wide) levels-which addresses issues regarding the economics of an aging population. Topics touched upon include retirement and the associated health care funding of the aged as well as social security and the asset classes that are considered asset-liability choices over time. The probability of achieving adequate return patterns from various investment strategies and asset classes is reviewed Shares rich insights on the aging, retirement, and pensions dilemma An assessment of the resources the real economy will be able to commit to non-workers is provided The three pillars of retirement are social security, company pensions, and private savings. Each of these pillars is confronted with a variety of asset-liability problems, and this book will addresses them.




Great Investment Ideas


Book Description

Great Investment Ideas is a collection of articles published in the Journal of Portfolio Management from 1993 to 2015. The book contains useful ideas for investment management and trading and discusses the methods, results and evaluation of great investors. It also covers important topics such as the effect of errors in means, variances and co-variances in portfolio selection problems, stock market crashes and stock market anomalies, portfolio theory and practice, evaluation theory, etc. This book is a must-have publication for investors and financial experts, researchers and graduate students in finance.




The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion


Book Description

This volume provides the definitive treatment of fortune's formula or the Kelly capital growth criterion as it is often called. The strategy is to maximize long run wealth of the investor by maximizing the period by period expected utility of wealth with a logarithmic utility function. Mathematical theorems show that only the log utility function maximizes asymptotic long run wealth and minimizes the expected time to arbitrary large goals. In general, the strategy is risky in the short term but as the number of bets increase, the Kelly bettor's wealth tends to be much larger than those with essentially different strategies. So most of the time, the Kelly bettor will have much more wealth than these other bettors but the Kelly strategy can lead to considerable losses a small percent of the time. There are ways to reduce this risk at the cost of lower expected final wealth using fractional Kelly strategies that blend the Kelly suggested wager with cash. The various classic reprinted papers and the new ones written specifically for this volume cover various aspects of the theory and practice of dynamic investing. Good and bad properties are discussed, as are fixed-mix and volatility induced growth strategies. The relationships with utility theory and the use of these ideas by great investors are featured.




Alternative Investments


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to alternative investments that reveals today's latest research and strategies Historically low interest rates and bear markets in world stock markets have generated intense interest in alternative investments. With returns in traditional investment vehicles relatively low, many professional investors view alternative investments as a means of meeting their return objectives. Alternative Investments: Instruments, Performance, Benchmarks, and Strategies, can put you in a better position to achieve this difficult goal. Part of the Robert W. Kolb Series in Finance, Alternative Investments provides an in-depth discussion of the historic performance, benchmarks, and strategies of every major alternative investment market. With contributions from professionals and academics around the world, it offers valuable insights on the latest trends, research, and thinking in each major area. Empirical evidence about each type of alternative investment is featured, with research presented in a straightforward manner. Examines a variety of major alternative asset classes, from real estate, private equity, and commodities to managed futures, hedge funds, and distressed securities Provides detailed insights on the latest research and strategies, and offers a thorough explanation of historical performance, benchmarks, and other critical information Blends knowledge from the conceptual world of scholars with the pragmatic view of practitioners in this field Alternative investments provide a means of diversification, risk control, and return enhancement and, as such, are attractive to many professional investors. If you're looking for an effective way to hone your skills in this dynamic area of finance, look no further than this book.




Portfolio Construction, Measurement, and Efficiency


Book Description

This volume, inspired by and dedicated to the work of pioneering investment analyst, Jack Treynor, addresses the issues of portfolio risk and return and how investment portfolios are measured. In a career spanning over fifty years, the primary questions addressed by Jack Treynor were: Is there an observable risk-return trade-off? How can stock selection models be integrated with risk models to enhance client returns? Do managed portfolios earn positive, and statistically significant, excess returns and can mutual fund managers time the market? Since the publication of a pair of seminal Harvard Business Review articles in the mid-1960’s, Jack Treynor has developed thinking that has greatly influenced security selection, portfolio construction and measurement, and market efficiency. Key publications addressed such topics as the Capital Asset Pricing Model and stock selection modeling and integration with risk models. Treynor also served as editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, through which he wrote many columns across a wide spectrum of topics. This volume showcases original essays by leading researchers and practitioners exploring the topics that have interested Treynor while applying the most current methodologies. Such topics include the origins of portfolio theory, market timing, and portfolio construction in equity markets. The result not only reinforces Treynor’s lasting contributions to the field but suggests new areas for research and analysis.