The Financial Services Authority’s review of With Profits policies has been motivated by a perception that consumer understanding of these products is insufficiently developed. This paper suggests that these concerns have not so much been overstated as misguided. With profits policies are...

This empirical study examines the impact of both advanced electronic trading platforms and index exchange traded funds (ETFs) on the minimum variance hedging of stock indices with futures. Our findings show that minimum variance hedging may provide an out-of-sample hedging performance that is...

The skewness in physical distributions of equity index returns and the implied volatility skew in the risk-neutral measure are subjects of extensive academic research. Much attention is now being focused on models that are able to capture time-varying conditional skewness and kurtosis. For this...

We derive the local volatility hedge ratios that are consistent with a stochastic instantaneous volatility and show that this ‘stochastic local volatility’ model is equivalent to the market model for implied volatilities. We also show that a common feature of all Markovian single factor...

We study the role of diversification in reducing the volatility of corporate bond returns induced by changes in credit spreads. Specifically, we look at how credit risk can be diminished when a portfolio is diversified across countries, industry sectors, maturities, seniority types and credit...

This paper presents a study of extreme interest rate movements in the U.S. Federal Funds market over almost a half century of daily observations from the mid 1950s through the end of 2000. We analyze the fluctuations of the maximal and minimal changes in short term interest rates and test the...

The current debate on the new Basel Accord gives rise to a natural question about the appropriate form of capital regulation. We construct a general framework to study this issue. We show that ex ante regulation wastes the expertise of a bank in measuring its risk exposure, while an ex post...

In this paper we report on a new class of derivative products which we refer to as equity-linked savings products. Equity-linked savings products require investors to pay periodic instalments in return for a predefined equity-linked payoff at maturity. We discuss the structuring, hedging,...

This paper investigates the optimal short-term hedging of Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) portfolios with index futures. Using daily data from May 2000 to December 2004 on the four largest passive ETFs (the Spider, the Diamond, the Cubes and the Russell iShare) and their corresponding index futures...

In the field of optimisation models for passive investments, we propose a general portfolio construction model based on principal component analysis. The portfolio is designed to replicate the first principal component of a group of stocks, instead of a traditional benchmark, thus capturing only...