Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

Popular smoothing techniques generally have a difficult time accommodating qualitative constraints like monotonicity, convexity or boundary conditions on the fitted function. In this paper, we attempt to bring the problem of constrained spline smoothing to the foreground and describe the details...

A recursive formula for computing the exact value of score vectors is proposed, which is more desirable than approximate values in some statistical analyses, for a general form of the linear Gaussian state space model. Unlike most extant methods, our formula calculates all components of the...

Diversification is a fundamental topic for all investors but there remains little agreement on how to measure it. Often it is defined ambiguously through risk-based portfolio construction techniques. Recently it has been suggested to connect maximising diversification with minimising risk...

Using big financial data for the price dynamics of U.S. equities, we investigate the impact that market microstructure noise has on modeling volatility of the returns. Based on wavelet transforms (DWT and MODWT) for decomposing the systematic pattern and noise, we propose a new wavelet-based...

We examine the problem of approximating, in the Frobenius-norm sense, a positive, semidefinite symmetric matrix by a rank-one matrix, with an upper bound on the cardinality of its eigenvector. The problem arises in the decomposition of a covariance matrix into sparse factors, and has wide...