Heuristic optimization methods and their application to finance are discussed. Two illustrations of these methods are presented: the selection of assets in a portfolio and the estimation of a complicated econometric model

RiskPortfolios is an R package for constructing risk-based portfolios. It provides a set of functionalities to build mean-variance, minimum variance, inverse-volatility weighted (Leote De Carvalho, Lu, and Moulin (2012)), equal-risk-contribution (Maillard, Roncalli, and Teïletche (2010)),...

Financial risk managers routinely use non-linear time series models to predict the downside risk of the capital under management. They also need to evaluate the adequacy of their model using so-called backtesting procedures. The latter involve hypothesis testing and evaluation of loss functions....

We investigate the direct connection between the uncertainty related to estimated stable ratios of stock prices and risk and return of two pairs trading strategies: a conditional statistical arbitrage method and an implicit arbitrage one. A simulation-based Bayesian procedure is introduced for...

We develop a new approach for evaluating performance across hedge funds. Our approach allows for performance comparisons between models that are misspecified – a common feature given the numerous factors that drive hedge fund returns. The empirical results show that the standard models used in...