Economic Value of Stock and Interest Rate Predictability in the UK

In this paper, we evaluate the forecast performance of a range of atheoretic and theory informed models of bond and stock returns. The decision making environment is fully described for an investor who would like to optimally allocate his portfolio between bonds and stocks, over an investment horizon of up to two years. We use a weekly dataset on UK Treasury Bill rates and the FTSE All-Share Index over the period 1997 to 2007, to examine the impact parameter uncertainty and predictability in returns have on how the investor optimally allocates his portfolio. The methods by which the forecasts should be computed and used in this context are described. Both statistical and decision based criteria are used to evaluate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of the models. Our results suggest that in the context of investment decision making under an economic value criterion, the investor gains from not only assuming predictability but by modelling the bond and stock returns together.