Empirical Finance is in crisis: Our most important "discovery" tool is historical simulation, and yet, most backtests published in leading Financial journals are flawed.The problem is well-known to professional organizations of Statisticians and Mathematicians, who have publicly criticized the...

We prove that high simulated performance is easily achievable after backtesting a relatively small number of alternative strategy configurations, a practice we denote “backtest overfitting”. The higher the number of configurations tried, the greater is the probability that the backtest is...

Most publications in Financial ML seem concerned with forecasting prices. While these are worthy endeavors, Financial ML can offer so much more. In this presentation, we review a few important applications that go beyond price forecasting:1. Portfolio construction2. Structural breaks3. Bet...

One of the most exciting recent developments in financial research is the availability of new administrative, private sector and micro-level datasets that did not exist a few years ago. The unstructured nature of many of these observations, along with the complexity of the phenomena they...

This article reviews ten notable financial applications where ML has moved beyond hype and proven its usefulness. This success does not mean that the use of ML in finance does not face important challenges. The main conclusion is that there is a strong case for applying ML to current financial...

Many investors rely on market experts and forecasters when making investment decisions, such as when to buy or sell securities. Ranking and grading market forecasters provides investors with metrics on which they may choose forecasters with the best record of accuracy for their particular market...

This paper finds positive evidence of return predictability and investment gains for individual corporate bonds for an extended period from 1973 to 2017. Our sample consists of both public and private company bond observations. We have implemented multiple machine learning methods and designed a...

Harvey, Liu, and Zhu (2016) “argue that most claimed research findings in financial economics are likely false.” Surprisingly, their false discovery rate (FDR) estimates suggest most are true. I revisit their results by developing non- and semi-parametric FDR estimators that account for...

Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market...

This paper revisits the predictability of bond excess returns by means of long-term forward interest rates. We assess the economic value of out-of-sample forecasting ability of empirical models based on forward rates in a dynamic asset allocation strategy. Our results show that the information...