The past several years have witnessed the introduction of hundreds of so-called “smart beta” equity indices. These indices provide exposure to risk factors, such as value or low volatility, in order to seek excess return and/or risk reduction compared to cap-weighted indices. Although the...

The battle between proponents of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and champions of behavioral finance has never been more pitched, and little consensus exists as to which side is winning or the implications for investment management and consulting. In this article, I review the case for and...

The term “equity premium puzzle” was coined in 1985 by economists Rajnish Mehra and Edward C. Prescott. The equity premium puzzle in considered one of the most significant questions in finance. A number of papers have explored the fundamental questions of why the premium exists and has not...

The CAPM is commonly used for an introduction of the equity cost in practice to calculate the corporate value, which is composed by the risk-free rate, equity market return and each respective beta. However, there is a fundamental complication between the risk, cost and return for the equity...

Resilient Asset Allocation (RAA) is a more aggressive version of our Lethargic Asset Allocation (LAA) strategy. It combines a more robust “All Weather” portfolio with even slower growth-trend (GT) filter and a faster market crash-protection. GT timing goes risk-off only when both the US...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...

CAPM has come a long way, has passed the time-test, and is fast coming out as a winner despite the onslaught of both, APT and multi-factor CAPM. The bottom line is that CAPM is needed, dead or alive. If so, it does not mean that CAPM stays as, “CAPM." Downside risk in recent times has caught...

The Capital Asset Pricing Model allows to price risky financial assets, in seductive simple way, but under various theoretical assumptions. Since its inception, CAPM has been questioned due to some of its unrealistic theoretical assumption or due to its empirical failures. Academicians have been...

Sharpe's (1964) Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) assumes that the relationship between risk and return is positive, linear and significant. However, it is not free from controversies and one of them advocates replacing CAPM's beta by downside beta based on investors' preference of downside...

Algorithmic Trading (AT) and High Frequency (HF) trading, which are responsible for over 70\% of US stocks trading volume, have greatly changed the microstructure dynamics of tick-by-tick stock data. In this paper we employ a hidden Markov model to examine how the intra-day dynamics of the stock...