Using a new data set on investor sentiment, we show that institutional and individual sentiment seem to proxy for smart money and noise trader risk, respectively. First, using bias-adjusted long-horizon regressions, we show that institutional sentiment forecasts stock market returns at intermediate horizons correctly, whereas individuals consistently get the direction wrong. Second, even the si...

This paper explores U.S. mutual fund flows, finding strong evidence of seasonal reallocation across funds based on fund exposure to risk. We show that substantial money moves from U.S. equity to U.S. money market and government bond mutual funds in the fall, then back to equity funds in the spring, controlling for the influence of past performance, advertising, liquidity needs, capital gains ov...

The present paper investigates the portfolio allocation decisions of an investor with infinite horizon when available financial assets differ in their degrees of liquidity. A model with risk neutral agents allows us to endogenously determine the liquidity premium. With risk averse agents, we develop a nontrivial portfolio allocation problem, which enables us to calculate the demand for an illiq...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new theory of portfolio selection which is based on evolutionary reasoning in simple repeated market situations. According to this new point of view the ultimate success of a portfolio strategy is measured by the wealth share the strategy is eventually able to conquer in an evolutionary process of market selection. We identify a simple portfolio strateg...

This article studies an optimal stopping problem with an endogenous constraint on the set of admissible stopping times. The constraint stipulates that continuation is permitted, at any given date t, only if the endogenous reward achieved exceeds a prespecified threshold. Characterizations of the value function and the optimal stopping time are presented. An application to the pricing of corpora...

We introduce the multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, solve it analytically, and discuss how it generalizes a vast class of continuous-time and discretetime multivariate processes. Relying on the simple geometrical interpretation of the dynamics of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process we introduce cointegration and its relationship to statistical arbitrage. We illustrate an application to swap co...

An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent’s preferences for information. The index of information transactions has a simple analytic characterization in terms of the relative entropy from priors to p...

The negative relationship between market P/E ratios and government bond yields seems to have become conventional wisdom among practitioners. Both (limited) empirical evidence and a (misleading) suggestion that the model originated in the Fed are used to support the model’s plausibility. The evidence in this note, from 20 international markets, seriously questions the wide acceptance and use of ...

This paper investigates the allocation decision of an investor who owns two projects, a domestic and a foreign one. A manager governs the expected return from each project, and the investor has less information on the actions of the foreign manager. The investor’s portfolio will be tilted relative to a situation with full information. With asymmetric information, he generally achieves a better ...

We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We take the standpoint of the world investor and we construct portfolios in international and local currencies based on five optimization models and two risk measures. We then compare the portfolio out-of-sample performance based on Sharpe and Sortino ratios thro...