Earning forecasts disclosed by financial analysts are known to be overly optimistic. Since an investor relies on their expertise, the question arises whether he would take analyst recommendations at face value or instead structure consultation with differently upward-biased analysts in a way...

Since its announcement made on Sept. 6, 2011, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) has been pursuing the goal of a minimum EUR/CHF exchange rate of 1.20, promising to intervene on currency markets to prevent the exchange rate from falling below this level. We use a compound option pricing approach to...

Many optimization-based portfolio rules fail to beat the simple 1/N rule out-of-sample because of parameter uncertainty. In this paper we suggest a grouping strategy in which we first form groups of equally weighted stocks and then optimize over the resulting groups only. This strategy aims at...

We compare two popular scenario tree generation methods in the context of financial optimization: Moment matching and scenario reduction. Using a simple problem with a known analytic solution, we find that moment matching, when accompanied by a check to ensure the absence of arbitrage...

Stochastic linear programming is a suitable numerical approach for solving practical asset-liability management problems. In this paper, we consider a multi-stage setting under time-varying investment opportunities and propose a decomposition of the benefits in dynamic re-allocation and...

We investigate whether the returns of some industry portfolios predict the returns of other industry portfolios. We find a strong lead-lag structure which is statistically and economically significant. These findings suggest that information diffuses only gradually across industries. Moreover,...

Over the last decades passive investment products have continuously increased in importance. The efficiency of financial markets is often identified as the main reason for this development. We propose a theoretical framework which reverses the causality by showing that market efficiency might...

Ledermann et al. (2011) propose random orthogonal matrix (ROM) simulation for generating multivariate samples matching means and covariances exactly. Its computational efficiency compared to standard Monte Carlo methods makes it an interesting alternative. In this paper we enhance this method's...

We consider a short-term investor who exploits return predictability in stocks and bonds to maximize mean-variance utility. Since the true parameters are unknown, we resort to portfolio optimization in form of linear regression with LASSO in order to mitigate problems related to estimation...