In a financial market with one riskless asset and n risky assets following geometric Brownian motions, we solve the problem of a pension fund maximizing the expected CRRA utility of its terminal wealth. By considering a stochastic death time for a subscriber, we solve a unique problem for both...

Standard tests designed to identify mutual funds with non-zero alphas are problematic, in that they do not adequately account for the presence of lucky funds. Lucky funds have significant estimated alphas, while their true alphas are equal to zero. To address this issue, this paper quantifies...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA from 1897 to 2008. We use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules and di- versies...

A factor analysis of returns of shares traded on the Brussels Stock Exchange reveals that the first dominant factor is highly correlated with the popular Bel-20 index and that a distinctive alternative trend is represented by the market's second factor. We propose a new stock index consisting of...

This paper develops a simple technique that controls for false discoveries, or mutual funds that exhibit significant alphas by luck alone. Our approach precisely separates funds into (1) unskilled, (2) zero-alpha, and (3) skilled funds, even with dependencies in cross-fund estimated alphas. We...

The collateralized loan obligation, CLO, market withstood the recent financial crisis with minimal losses compared to other structured asset-backed securities. Furthermore, the issuance of new CLOs is now above pre-crisis levels, prompting an understanding of what drives CLO performance. A...

We develop a novel approach to jointly examine skill, scale, and value added across individual funds. We find that the value added is (i) positive for the vast majority of funds, and (ii) close to its optimal level after an adjustment period possibly due to investors' learning. We also show that...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the DJIA index from 1897 to 2011, and use the False Discovery Rate as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more outperforming rules which allows...

Since the work by Stigler on the economics of information in the early 1960s, economists have paid closer attention to the role of search for information. However, search methods are not considered in the theory of portfolio choice. We present a model of investor search behavior in order to...

Despite portfolio construction based on expected utility theory and Markowitz mean-variance optimization having been the foundation of financial economic theory for more than 50 years, its practical application by financial advisors has been limited. Particularly troubling are the lack of a...