Strategic Asset Allocation


Book Description

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.




Optimal Mean Reversion Trading


Book Description

"Optimal Mean Reversion Trading: Mathematical Analysis and Practical Applications provides a systematic study to the practical problem of optimal trading in the presence of mean-reverting price dynamics. It is self-contained and organized in its presentation, and provides rigorous mathematical analysis as well as computational methods for trading ETFs, options, futures on commodities or volatility indices, and credit risk derivatives. This book offers a unique financial engineering approach that combines novel analytical methodologies and applications to a wide array of real-world examples. It extracts the mathematical problems from various trading approaches and scenarios, but also addresses the practical aspects of trading problems, such as model estimation, risk premium, risk constraints, and transaction costs. The explanations in the book are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious student or researcher, and complete enough to give the necessary background material for further exploration into the subject and related literature. This book will be a useful tool for anyone interested in financial engineering, particularly algorithmic trading and commodity trading, and would like to understand the mathematically optimal strategies in different market environments."--







Handbook of Portfolio Construction


Book Description

Portfolio construction is fundamental to the investment management process. In the 1950s, Harry Markowitz demonstrated the benefits of efficient diversification by formulating a mathematical program for generating the "efficient frontier" to summarize optimal trade-offs between expected return and risk. The Markowitz framework continues to be used as a basis for both practical portfolio construction and emerging research in financial economics. Such concepts as the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), for example, provide the foundation for setting benchmarks, for predicting returns and risk, and for performance measurement. This volume showcases original essays by some of today’s most prominent academics and practitioners in the field on the contemporary application of Markowitz techniques. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, including portfolio selection, data mining tests, and multi-factor risk models, the book presents a comprehensive approach to portfolio construction tools, models, frameworks, and analyses, with both practical and theoretical implications.




Lifecycle Investing


Book Description

Diversification provides a well-known way of getting something close to a free lunch: by spreading money across different kinds of investments, investors can earn the same return with lower risk (or a much higher return for the same amount of risk). This strategy, introduced nearly fifty years ago, led to such strategies as index funds. What if we were all missing out on another free lunch that’s right under our noses? InLifecycle Investing, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres-two of the most innovative thinkers in business, law, and economics-have developed tools that will allow nearly any investor to diversify their portfolios over time. By using leveraging when young-a controversial idea that sparked hate mail when the authors first floated it in the pages ofForbes-investors of all stripes, from those just starting to plan to those getting ready to retire, can substantially reduce overall risk while improving their returns. InLifecycle Investing, readers will learn How to figure out the level of exposure and leverage that’s right foryou How the Lifecycle Investing strategy would have performed in the historical market Why it will work even if everyone does it Whennotto adopt the Lifecycle Investing strategy Clearly written and backed by rigorous research,Lifecycle Investingpresents a simple but radical idea that will shake up how we think about retirement investing even as it provides a healthier nest egg in a nicely feathered nest.




Portfolio Optimization and Performance Analysis


Book Description

In answer to the intense development of new financial products and the increasing complexity of portfolio management theory, Portfolio Optimization and Performance Analysis offers a solid grounding in modern portfolio theory. The book presents both standard and novel results on the axiomatics of the individual choice in an uncertain framework, cont




Financial Markets Theory


Book Description

A presentation of classical asset pricing theory, this textbook is the only one to address the economic foundations of financial markets theory from a mathematically rigorous standpoint and to offer a self-contained critical discussion based on empirical results. Tools for understanding the economic analysis are provided, and mathematical models are presented in discrete time/finite state space for simplicity. Examples and exercises included.




Handbook Of The Fundamentals Of Financial Decision Making (In 2 Parts)


Book Description

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2nd edition published in 2006).




Overcoming the Saving Slump


Book Description

The great majority of working Americans are unprepared to face the difficult task of planning for retirement. In fact, the personal savings rate has been holding steady at zero for several years, down from 8 percent in the mid-1980s. Overcoming the Saving Slump explores the many challenges facing workers in the transition from a traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility, analyzing the considerable impediments to saving and evaluating financial literacy programs devised by employers and the government. Mapping the changing landscape of pensions and the rise of defined contribution plans, Annamaria Lusardi and others investigate new methods for stimulating saving and promoting financial education drawing on the experience of the United States as well as countries that have privatized their welfare systems, including Sweden and Chile. This timely volume pinpoints where human resources departments, the financial industry, and government officials have succeeded—or failed—in bridging the way to a new retirement system. As the workforce ages and more pensions disappear each second, Lusardi’s findings will be invaluable for economists and anyone facing retirement.




Empirical Asset Pricing


Book Description

“Bali, Engle, and Murray have produced a highly accessible introduction to the techniques and evidence of modern empirical asset pricing. This book should be read and absorbed by every serious student of the field, academic and professional.” Eugene Fama, Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago and 2013 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences “The empirical analysis of the cross-section of stock returns is a monumental achievement of half a century of finance research. Both the established facts and the methods used to discover them have subtle complexities that can mislead casual observers and novice researchers. Bali, Engle, and Murray’s clear and careful guide to these issues provides a firm foundation for future discoveries.” John Campbell, Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics, Harvard University “Bali, Engle, and Murray provide clear and accessible descriptions of many of the most important empirical techniques and results in asset pricing.” Kenneth R. French, Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College “This exciting new book presents a thorough review of what we know about the cross-section of stock returns. Given its comprehensive nature, systematic approach, and easy-to-understand language, the book is a valuable resource for any introductory PhD class in empirical asset pricing.” Lubos Pastor, Charles P. McQuaid Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Empirical Asset Pricing: The Cross Section of Stock Returns is a comprehensive overview of the most important findings of empirical asset pricing research. The book begins with thorough expositions of the most prevalent econometric techniques with in-depth discussions of the implementation and interpretation of results illustrated through detailed examples. The second half of the book applies these techniques to demonstrate the most salient patterns observed in stock returns. The phenomena documented form the basis for a range of investment strategies as well as the foundations of contemporary empirical asset pricing research. Empirical Asset Pricing: The Cross Section of Stock Returns also includes: Discussions on the driving forces behind the patterns observed in the stock market An extensive set of results that serve as a reference for practitioners and academics alike Numerous references to both contemporary and foundational research articles Empirical Asset Pricing: The Cross Section of Stock Returns is an ideal textbook for graduate-level courses in asset pricing and portfolio management. The book is also an indispensable reference for researchers and practitioners in finance and economics. Turan G. Bali, PhD, is the Robert Parker Chair Professor of Finance in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. The recipient of the 2014 Jack Treynor prize, he is the coauthor of Mathematical Methods for Finance: Tools for Asset and Risk Management, also published by Wiley. Robert F. Engle, PhD, is the Michael Armellino Professor of Finance in the Stern School of Business at New York University. He is the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, Director of the New York University Stern Volatility Institute, and co-founding President of the Society for Financial Econometrics. Scott Murray, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Finance in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He is the recipient of the 2014 Jack Treynor prize.