We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Replicating portfolios have recently emerged as an important tool in the life insurance industry, used for the valuation of companies' liabilities. This paper presents a replicating portfolio (RP) model for approximating life insurance liabilities as closely as possible. We minimize the L1 error...

A classic paper of Borwein/Lewis (1991) studies optimisation problems over L^p_+ with finitely many linear equality constraints, given by scalar products with functions from L^q. One key result shows that if some x in L^p_+ satisfies the constraints and if the constraint functions are...

We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distribution. Finding Omega-optimal portfolios, in particular under realistic constraints like cardinality restrictions, requires to...

In modern portfolio theory, financial portfolios are characterised by a desired property, the 'reward', and something undesirable, the 'risk'. While these properties are commonly identified with mean and variance of returns, respectively, we test alternative specifications like partial and...

This chapter gives an overview of current research in evolutionary finance. We mainly focus on the survival and stability properties of investment strategies associated with the Kelly rule. Our approach to the study of the wealth dynamics of investment strategies is inspired by Darwinian ideas...

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependence between her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminal payoff . Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to a rather concentrated...