We develop a metric to measure how far banks are away from regulatory compliance under Basel III. Basel III consists of multiple constraints. Our measure is a portfolio that simultanously covers all constraints and their interdependencies. We apply our measure to a sample of European banks and...

Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) were established in Europe in 2000 and have grown to a size of over 200 bn US$. Some issuers use a full replication strategy while others prefer a swap based approach. The ETF are dealt parallelly in the primary and in the secondary market, as new ETFs can be created...

Hedge Funds are often considered as a possibility for optimizing traditional portfolios due to their alternative risk factors and sources of return. But as the return distribution of hedge funds shows negative skewness and excess kurtosis, using portfolio optimization techniques, based on the...

The investment in commodities is starting to be more important during the last years. The paper describes the characteristics of financially important commodities. In many cases a passive investment in an index is most suitable. As the GSCI is found to be the most important, its underlying...