Volatility is usually considered as a synonym for risk. Mainstream financial theory states that higher portfolio volatility is translated into higher expected returns while diversification helps eliminate idiosyncratic risks. This leaves us with an apparent anomaly as low-risk (low-beta) stocks...

Portfolio risk forecasts are commonly evaluated using test statistics that are sums of random variables. We study the distributional properties of these test statistics for value at risk, expected shortfall, and volatility. For a diverse collection of 74 US equity portfolios, risk forecasts...

Factor models are standards in investment management. For decades, Barra factor models have provided valuable risk forecasts and inputs for the portfolio construction process. Most uses of factor models have targeted longer horizons of months or years. However, we demonstrate in this paper that...

Systematic model bias has been implicated in the global recession that began in 2007, and this bias can be traced back to assumptions about the normality of data. Nonetheless, the normal distribution continues to play a foundational role in quantitative finance. One reason for this is that the...

In this paper we try to assess the impact of various policy changes on the ability of the insurance industry to preserve or increase the shareholders' value. As a proxy of the sensitivity of the shareholders value, we measure the sensitivity of ROE (Return On Equities) to three main variables...

Minimum market transparency requirements impose hedge fund (HF) managers to use the statement declared strategy in practice. However each declared strategy may actually origin a multiplicity of implemented management decisions. Is then the quot;actual quot;strategy the same as the...

In this paper we describe life insurance contracts as a portfolio of financial options. This type of policy constitutes the bulk of mathematical reserves of continental European insurance companies. A close examination of a typical contract reveals an exchange of options between policy holders...

Profit margins on endowment policies offered by European life insurers have been declining in recent years, due to a combination of low inflation and low bond yields. This is because these profit margins are a positive function of the gap between the risk-free rate and the minimum guaranteed...

Minimum market transparency requirements impose Hedge Fund (HF) managers to use the statement declared strategy in practice. However each declared strategy may actually lead to a multiplicity of implemented management decisions. Is then the actual strategy the same as the announced strategy? Can...