Convex optimization solutions tend to be unstable, to the point of entirely offsetting the benefits of optimization. For example, in the context of financial applications, it is known that portfolios optimized in-sample often underperform the naïve (equal weights) allocation out-of-sample. This...

With the advent in recent years of large financial data sets, machine learning and high-performance computing, analysts can backtest millions (if not billions) of alternative investment strategies. Backtest optimizers search for combinations of parameters that maximize the simulated historical...

Most papers in the financial literature estimate the p-value associated with an investment strategy, without reporting the power of the test used to make that discovery. In this paper we provide analytic estimates to Type I and Type II errors for the Sharpe ratios of investments, and derive...

Correlation matrices are ubiquitous in finance. Some key applications include portfolio construction, risk management, and factor/style analysis. Correlation matrices are usually estimated from historical empirical observations or derived from historically estimated factors. It is widely...

Financial contagion and systemic risk measures are commonly derived from conditional quantiles by using imposed model assumptions such as a linear parametrization. In this paper, we provide model free measures for contagion and systemic risk which are independent of the specifcation of...

This paper develops a wavelet (spectral) approach to estimate the parameters of a linear regression model where the regressand and the regressors are persistent processes and contain a measurement error. We propose a wavelet filtering approach which does not require instruments and yields...

This paper proposes a consistent estimator for the realized covariance of high frequency and asynchronous assets' returns that are contaminated by microstructure noise. The main contribution is the introduction of the pseudoaggregation which transforms the observations into series with the same...

Information-theoretic methods have recently been proposed for the simultaneous recovery of investors’ beliefs about future macroeconomic and financial outcomes and their risk preferences from observed asset prices. These methods estimate beliefs and preferences to minimize the statistical...

We investigate portfolio selection performance as in Markowitz by evaluating variance matrix estimation criteria in the currency market. This study challenges theoretically rigorous shrinkage covariance estimators using multiple evaluation metrics: systematic loss function, risk profile of...

The aim of this paper is to propose and test a novel PF method called Sequential Gibbs Particle Filter allowing to estimate complex latent state variable models with unknown parameters. The framework is applied to a stochastic volatility model with independent jumps in returns and volatility....