In this chapter, we apply a popular Machine Learning approach (extreme gradient boosted trees) to build enhanced diversified equity portfolios. A simple naïve equally-weighted portfolio of US stocks based on a boosted tree-based signal generates on average an excess return of 3.1% per annum,...

We build regression trees to determine which firm characteristics are most likely to drive future returns. Out of 30 attributes, those related to momentum appear to have, by far, the most marked impact. This prominence is verified at the sector level as well. The second order effects are...

In this article, we investigate the impact of truncating training data when fitting regression trees. We argue that training times can be curtailed by reducing the training sample without any loss in out-of-sample accuracy as long as the prediction model has been trained on the tails of the...

This paper examines the forecasting performance of GARCH's models used with agricultural commodities data. We compare different possible sources of forecasting improvement, using various statistical distributions and models. We have chosen to confine our analysis on four indices which are the...

Nowadays commodity investing is facing a tremendous interest from all kinds of investors, the surging amount invested in commodity related indices being one of the manifestations of this phenomenon. Due to their historical de-correlation with conventional securities and their hedging properties...

In this paper we develop a structural equation model with latent variables in an ordinal setting which allows us to test broker-dealer predictive ability of financial market movements. We use a multivariate logit model in a latent factor framework, develop a tractable estimator based on a...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called “soft dollars” which basically are amounts spent in “research” for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD 10 paid...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...