Building international financial conditions indices
IMF staff has developed global financial conditions indices for 43 global economies. Conceptually, these indices extract the communal component of range of indicators for...
On “institutional herding”
Herding denotes broad uniformity of buying and selling across investors. If the transactions of one institution encourage or reinforce those of another, escalatory dynamics,...
Factor momentum: a brief introduction
Standard equity factors are autocorrelated. Hence, it is not surprising that factor strategies have also displayed momentum: past returns have historically predicted future returns....
Measuring diversification and downside risk
Deutsche Bank’s Handbook of Portfolio Construction gives a great introduction to two important principles for diversification and risk management of portfolios. First, tail dependence...
How U.S. mutual funds reallocate assets
An empirical study shows that U.S. mutual funds take two major allocation decisions: bonds versus equity and U.S. versus non-U.S. assets. Federal Reserve policy...
Retail investor beliefs
Survey evidence suggests that retail investors adjust positions rather sluggishly to changing beliefs and the beliefs themselves contradict classic rationality. Sluggishness arises from two...
Treasury basis and dollar overshooting
Safe dollar assets, such as Treasury securities, carry significant convenience yields. Their suitability for liquidity management and collateralization means that they provide value over...
Summary: Macro information efficiency and investment strategies
Markets are not efficient in respect to macroeconomic information, because both research and strategy development are expensive. As a result, there is ample scope for value generation...
What variance swaps tell us about risk premia
Variance swaps are over-the-counter derivatives that exchange payments related to future realized price variance against fixed rates. Variance swaps help estimating term structures for...
Realistic volatility risk premia
The volatility risk premium compensates investors for taking volatility risk. Conceptually it is based on the difference between options-implied and expected realized volatility. In...
RECENT ARTICLES
Crashes in safe asset markets
A new theoretical paper illustrates the logic behind runs and crashes in modern safe asset markets. Safe assets are characterized by stable value and...
Copulas and trading strategies
Reliance on linear correlation coefficients and joint normal distribution of returns in multi-asset trading strategies can be badly misleading. Such conventions often overestimate diversification...
Trend following: combining market and macro information
Classic trend following is based on market prices or returns. Market trends are relatively cheap to produce, popular, and plausibly generate value in the...