A novel approach for stress-testing (portfolios of) financial assets is presented. The technique extends the parametric Entropy Pooling approach to skewed and thick-tailed markets. The technique rests on a copula-marginal decomposition for the entropy together with several approximation schemes...

Few papers provide research about options returns, and the few available are focused in the analysis from the perspective of the long side of the option contract, i.e. the buyer that pays the price and her expected and realized option return. The main point of our research work is to provide a...

Modelling and forecasting of asset volatility and covariance is of prime importance in the construction of portfolios. In this paper, we present a generalised multi-factor model that incorporates heteroskedasticity and dependence in the idiosyncratic error terms. We apply this model to...

We introduce a simple approach to managing portfolio interest rate risk that is consistent and performs well across different interest rate regimes, including when interest rates are low or even negative. Inspired by Black (1995), this approach uses a novel inverse-call transformation...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

We introduce Dynamic Entropy Pooling, a quantitative technique to perform dynamic portfolio construction with discretionary, non-synchronous views. With Dynamic Entropy Pooling, the portfolio manager can embed in the allocation process signals with life spans ranging from minutes to years,...

When analyzing options returns, most papers tend to focus on the expected and realized return from strategies where the investors are long on those financial instruments. We conduct a test searching for excess returns on passive options investment strategies resorting to a four factor model,...

We measure the contributions to risk of a set of factors, strategies, or investments, based on "Minimum-Torsion Bets", namely a set of uncorrelated factors, optimized to closely track the factors used to allocate the portfolio. We then introduce a novel definition of contributions to risk, which...

The volatility premium is a well-documented phenomenon, which can be approximated by the difference between the previous month level of the VIX Index and the rolling 30-day close-to-close volatility. In concordance with existing literature, we show evidence that VIX is generally above the 30-day...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...