In general it is not a priori clear which kind of information is supposed to be used for calculating the fair value of a contingent claim. Even if the information is specified, it is not guaranteed that the fair value is uniquely determined by the given information. A further problem is that...

In this paper, we derive two shrinkage estimators for minimum-variance portfolios that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return. The presented results hold for any number of assets and number of observations . The small-sample...

We develop a general approach to portfolio optimization taking account of estimation risk and stylized facts of empirical finance. This is done within a Bayesian framework. The approximation of the posterior distribution of the unknown model parameters is based on a parallel tempering algorithm....

This paper analyzes the spectral properties of Tyler’s M-estimator for scatter Tn,d. It is shown that if a multivariate sample stems from a generalized spherically distributed population and the sample size n and the dimension d both go to infinity while d/n→0, then the empirical spectral...

In the context of modern portfolio theory, we compare the out-of-sample performance of eight investment strategies which are based on statistical methods with the out-of-sample performance of a family of trivial strategies. A wide range of approaches is considered in this work, including the...

In this paper, we derive two shrinkage estimators for minimum-variance portfolios that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return. The presented results hold for any number of assets and number of observations . The small-sample...

Market efficiency at least requires the absence of weak arbitrage opportunities, but this is not sufficient to establish a situation where the market is sensitive, i.e., where it "fully reflects" or "rapidly adjusts to" some information flow including the evolution of asset prices. By contrast,...

It has been frequently observed in the literature that many multivariate statistical methods require the covariance or dispersion matrix [Sigma] of an elliptical distribution only up to some scaling constant. If the topic of interest is not the scale but only the shape of the elliptical...

We study copulas generated by elliptical distributions. We show that their tail dependence can be simply computed with default routines on Student's t-distribution given Kendall's [tau] and the tail index. The copula family generated by the sub-Gaussian [alpha]-stable distribution is unable to...