In the winter 2011/12 a wave of internal capital flight prompted the ECB to abandon its exit strategy and to announce an unprecedented monetary expansion. We analyze this episode in several dimensions: (i) by providing an event-study analysis covering key variables from national central banks'...

The Cornish-Fisher expansion is a popular method to adjust value-at-risk calculations for the skewness and kurtosis of non-normal return distribution. On the other hand, it is an open secret that “modified value-at-risk” calculations produce “strange” results from time to time, under...

Portfolio theory got it all wrong: asset weights are not decision variables, because security prices a portfolio manager does not have full control over asset prices. In this note, we are trying to create awareness that real-valued allocations which have been calculated from numerical portfolio...

Ex post volatility is defined as dispersion of ex post portfolio returns over the measurement period. Ex post volatility takes into account the variability in asset returns and changes of asset weights over time due to trading and drift. Ex ante volatility, on the other hand, is defined as...

We explain the variability of the mean-variance efficient frontier over time with a statistical three factor model. For an asset universe consisting of 22 stocks listed in Switzerland, the model explains more than 99% of the time variations in the efficient frontier.The three factors can be...

We present a portfolio construction approach with two interesting non-standard features: First, the risk measure used is “drawdown-at-risk”, an interesting concept combining attractive features of drawdown and value-at-risk measures. Second, the efficient frontier is calculated from...