Is it possible to achieve almost riskless investment results in the long run through equity investments? The persistence of low interest rates is spurring research on this question, because of the need to increase yields, while limiting variability of investment results. Target date funds aim to...

The problem of market predictability can be decomposed into two parts: predictive models and predictors. At first, we show how the joint employment of model selection and machine learning models can dramatically increase our capability to forecast the equity premium out-of-sample. Secondly, we...

Market efficiency and the pricing kernel are closely related. A non-monotonic decreasing pricing kernel implies the existence of a trading strategy in contingent claims that stochastically dominates a direct investment in the market. Moreover, a market is assumed to be efficient only if no...

The forward-looking nature of option market data allows one to derive economically-based and model-free risk measures. This article proposes an extensive analysis of the performances of option-implied VaR and CVaR, and compare them with classical risk measures for the S&P500 Index. Delivering...

Empirical indicators of sentiment are commonly employed in the economic literature while a precise understanding of what is sentiment is still missing. Exploring the links among the most popular proxies of sentiment, fear and uncertainty this paper aims to fi ll this gap. We show how fear and...

VaR (Value at Risk) and CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) are implied by option prices. Their relationships to option prices are derived initially under the pricing measure. It does not require assumptions about the distribution of portfolio returns. The effects of changes of measure are modest...