The evaluation of a portfolio and its risk exposure with respect to market movements become di cult as soon as contingent claims are involved. In case only the performance of a portfolio has to be determined, practitioners use the mark-to-market pricing each trading day and observe the value changes of the underlying portfolio ex post. A price series becomes available which reveals not only the...

Robust portfolio optimization aims to maximize the worst-case portfolio return given that the asset returns are allowed to vary within a prescribed uncertainty set. If the uncertainty set is not too large, the resulting portfolio performs well under normal market conditions. However, its performance may substantially degrade in the presence of market crashes, that is, if the asset returns mater...

The mutual fund theorem (MFT) is considered in a general semimartingale financial market S with a finite time horizon T , where agents maximize expected utility of terminal wealth. The main results are: (i) Let N be the wealth process of the numéraire portfolio (i.e., the optimal portfolio for the log utility). If any path-independent option with maturity T written on the numéraire portfolio ca...

We investigate the statistical properties of the cross-correlation matrix between individual stocks traded in the Korean stock market using the random matrix theory (RMT) and observe how these affect the portfolio weights in the Markowitz portfolio theory. We find that the distribution of the cross-correlation matrix is positively skewed and changes over time. We find that the eigenvalue distri...

We study the destabilising e¤ect of dynamic hedging strategies on the price of the underlying in the presence of sunk costs of transaction. Once sunk costs of transaction are taken into account, continuous portfolio rehedging is no longer an optimal strategy. Using a non-optimising (local in time) strategy for portfolio rebalancing, explicit dynamics for the price of the underlying are derived,...

We provide novel evidence on which theories best explain stock return anomalies by decomposing anomaly portfolio returns into components driven by the underlying …rms’cash ‡ows or their discount rates. For each of …ve well-known anomalies, we …nd that cash ‡ow shocks explain more variation in anomaly portfolio returns than discount rate shocks. The cash ‡ow and discount rate components of each ...

In contemporary credit portfolio management, the portfolio risk-return analysis of financial instruments using certain downside credit risk measures requires the computation of a set of Pareto-efficient portfolio structures in a non-linear, non-convex setting. For real-world problems, additional constraints, e. g. supervisory capital limits, have to be respected. Particularly for formerly non-t...

This paper considers the optimization of portfolios of real and contractual assets, including derivative instruments, subject to a Value-at-Risk (VaR) constraint, with special emphasis on applications in electric power. The focus is on translating VaR definitions for a longer period of time, say a year, to decisions on shorter periods of time, say a week or a month. Thus, if a VaR constraint is...

In this paper, I will describe examples of state-of-the-art practice in supply-chain management; e.g., vendor-managed inventory, quick response, and other contemporary systems, such as Wal-Mart’s RetailLink. The perspective will be that of what I call the IDIB Portfolio; i.e., what Information (I), Decision-Making (D), Implementation (I), and Buffer (B) systems are employed in managing real-wor...

This paper gives an insight into the MOSEP project, funded by the European Commission (Leonardo da Vinci Programme). The project focuses on the high dropout rates amongst young students (14-16) in the transition phase from middle to upper secondary school or into first vocational education. MOSEP addresses this problem by proposing to introduce the method of electronic learning and development ...