The performance of dynamic trading and investment strategies can be difficult to predict. Although not without its problems, analysis of the historical performance of a strategy can provide valuable insight into its general risk and return properties. Furthermore, historical analysis allows one...

Pushing models to extremes can expose output biases that stem from underlying assumptions. In the case of industry standard option valuation models, long term, high volatility securities provide a stress test vehicle. For instance, in evaluating a stock with 60% volatility, industry standard...

In this report we study South African implied volatility from three different perspectives. Firstly, we conduct an analysis of the historical Top40 Index implied volatility surface dynamics. In particular, we consider the regime-dependence of atm volatility and skew levels and how this...

This paper examines the relationship between currency option's implied skewness and its future realized skewness, where the difference is known as the skewness risk premium (SRP). The SRP indicates whether investors pay a premium to be insured against future crash risk. Past investigations about...

It is now an accepted fact that the majority of financial markets worldwide are neither normal nor constant, and South Africa is no exception. One idea that can be used to understand such markets and has been gaining popularity recently is that of regimes and regime-switching models. In this...

Large-scale inference has become increasingly popular in financial economics. I explore an empirical Bayes approach to large-scale multiple testing. The proposed approach bases its inference on the posterior probability that the null is true given the observed data. It provides a convenient way...

While fiscal plans are expected to provide timely information about planned fiscal budgets, little is known about their value to investors. This paper examines how governments’ fiscal plans can enrich equity investors’ information set and induce consensus about the future fiscal outlook. We...

We construct portfolios based on characteristic weights and develop a novel way to measure capacity of these portfolios to absorb capital. Our estimates suggest that portfolio capacity is the highest for fundamental-weights, whereas portfolios based on momentum, equal risk budget, and equal...

Evidence suggests that rational, periodically collapsing speculative bubbles may be pervasive in stock markets globally, but there is no research that considers them at the individual stock level. In this study we develop and test an empirical asset pricing model that allows for speculative...

Traditional machine learning methods have been widely studied in financial innovation. My study focuses on the application of deep learning methods on asset pricing.I investigate various deep learning methods for asset pricing, especially for risk premia measurement. All models take the same set...