Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Adequate Decision Rules for Portfolio Choice Problems

Adequate Decision Rules for Portfolio Choice Problems
Author: T. Goodall
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1403907315

The author presents the theory of portfolio choice from a new perspective, recommending decision rules that have advantages over those currently used in theory and practice. Portfolio choice theory relies on expected values. Goodall argues that this dependence has a historical basis and argues that current decision rules are inadequate for most portfolio choice situations. Drawing on econometric solutions proposed for the problem of forecasting outcomes of a chance experiment, the author defines adequacy criteria, and proposes adequate decision rules for a variety of situations. Goodall's theory combines the problems of prediction and choice, and formulates solutions based on cost functions that fit the underlying decision situation.

Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making

Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making
Author: Leonard C. MacLean
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 941
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9814417351

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2 nd edition published in 2006).

Portfolio Selection

Portfolio Selection
Author: Harry Markowitz
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0300013728

Embracing finance, economics, operations research, and computers, this book applies modern techniques of analysis and computation to find combinations of securities that best meet the needs of private or institutional investors.

Optimal Portfolio Choice Under Loss Aversion

Optimal Portfolio Choice Under Loss Aversion
Author: Arjan B. Berkelaar
Publisher:
Total Pages: 31
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper analyses the optimal investment strategy for loss averse investors, assuming a complete market and general Ito processes for the asset prices. The loss averse investor follows a partial portfolio insurance strategy. When the planning horizon of the investor is short, i.e. less than 5 years, he or she considerably reduces the initial portfolio weight of stocks compared to an investor with smooth power utility. Consistent with popular investment advice, the initial portfolio weight of stocks of a loss averse investor typically increases with the investment horizon. The empirical section of the paper estimates the level of loss aversion implied by historical US stock market data, using a representative agent model. We find that loss aversion and risk aversion cannot be disentangled and provide a similar fit to the data.

Portfolio Selection Under Partial Observation and Constant Relative Risk Aversion

Portfolio Selection Under Partial Observation and Constant Relative Risk Aversion
Author: Simon Brendle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2004
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper is concerned with an optimal investment problem under incomplete information for an investor with constant relative risk aversion. We assume that the investor can only observe the asset prices, but not their instantaneous returns. The instantaneous returns are modeled by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We first assume that the initial distribution is Gaussian. In this case, we analytically solve the Bellman equation, and identify the optimal investment strategy under incomplete information. We study the relationship between the value function under partial observation and the value function under full observation, and derive a formula for the economic value of information. Furthermore, we outline how the optimal strategy under partial observation can be computed from the optimal strategy for an investor with full observation.In market with only one risky asset, we are able to derive closed form expressions for the value functions under both partial and full observation. We also provide an explicit formula for the economic value of information.Finally, we point out how our results in the Gaussian case can be extended to general non-Gaussian initial distributions.

Portfolio Risk Analysis

Portfolio Risk Analysis
Author: Gregory Connor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400835291

Portfolio risk forecasting has been and continues to be an active research field for both academics and practitioners. Almost all institutional investment management firms use quantitative models for their portfolio forecasting, and researchers have explored models' econometric foundations, relative performance, and implications for capital market behavior and asset pricing equilibrium. Portfolio Risk Analysis provides an insightful and thorough overview of financial risk modeling, with an emphasis on practical applications, empirical reality, and historical perspective. Beginning with mean-variance analysis and the capital asset pricing model, the authors give a comprehensive and detailed account of factor models, which are the key to successful risk analysis in every economic climate. Topics range from the relative merits of fundamental, statistical, and macroeconomic models, to GARCH and other time series models, to the properties of the VIX volatility index. The book covers both mainstream and alternative asset classes, and includes in-depth treatments of model integration and evaluation. Credit and liquidity risk and the uncertainty of extreme events are examined in an intuitive and rigorous way. An extensive literature review accompanies each topic. The authors complement basic modeling techniques with references to applications, empirical studies, and advanced mathematical texts. This book is essential for financial practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students who want to understand the nature of financial markets or work toward improving them.