The fact that derivative securities are equivalent to specific dynamic trading strategies in complete markets suggests the possibility of constructing buy-and-hold portfolios of options that mimic certain dynamic investment policies, e.g., asset-allocation rules. We explore this possibility by solving the following problem: given an optimal dynamic investment policy, find a set of options at the start of the investment horizon which will come closest to the optimal dynamic investment policy. We solve this problem for several combinations of preferences, return dynamics, and optimality criteria, and show that under certain conditions, a portfolio consisting of just a few options is an excellent substitute for considerably more complex dynamic investment policies.

Given a European derivative security with an arbitrary payoff function and a corresponding set of underlying securities on which the derivative security is based, we solve the dynamic replication problem: find a self-financing dynamic portfolio strategy—involving only the underlying securities—that most closely approximates the payoff function at maturity. By applying stochastic dynamic programming to the minimization of a mean-squared-error loss function under Markov state-dynamics, we derive recursive expressions for the optimal-replication strategy that are readily implemented in practice. The approximation error or "epsilon" of the optimal-replication strategy is also given recursively and may be used to quantify the "degree" of market incompleteness. To investigate the practical significance of these epsilon-arbitrage strategies, we consider several numerical examples including path-dependent options and options on assets with stochastic volatility and jumps.

Ever since the publication in 1565 of Girolamo Cardano's treatise on gambling, Liber de Ludo Aleae (The Book of Games of Chance), statistics and financial markets have become inextricably linked. Over the past few decades many of these links have become part of the canon of modern finance, and it is now impossible to fully appreciate the workings of financial markets without them. This selective survey covers three of the most important ideas of finance—efficient markets, the random walk hypothesis, and derivative pricing models—that illustrate the enormous research opportunities that lie at the intersection of finance and statistics.

This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation.

Computational finance, an exciting new cross-disciplinary research area, draws extensively on the tools and techniques of computer science, statistics, information systems, and financial economics. This book covers the techniques of data mining, knowledge discovery, genetic algorithms, neural networks, bootstrapping, machine learning, and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods are applied to a wide range of problems in finance, including risk management, asset allocation, style analysis, dynamic trading and hedging, forecasting, and option pricing. The book is based on the sixth annual international conference Computational Finance 1999, held at New York University's Stern School of Business.

The dramatic growth in institutionally managed assets, coupled with the advent of internet trading and electronic brokerage for retail investors, has led to a surge in the size and volume of trading. At the same time, competition in the asset management industry has increased to the point where fractions of a percent in performance can separate the top funds from those in the next tier. In this environment, portfolio managers have begun to explore active management of trading costs as a means of boosting returns. Controlling execution cost can be viewed as a stochastic dynamic optimization problem because trading takes time, stock prices exhibit random fluctuations, and execution prices depend on trade size, order flow, and market conditions. In this paper, we apply stochastic dynamic programming to derive trading strategies that minimize the expected cost of executing a portfolio of securities over a fixed period of time, i.e., we derive the optimal sequence of trades as a function of prices, quantitites, and other market conditions. To illustrate the practical relevance of our methods, we apply them to a hypothetical portfolio of 25 stocks by estimating their price-impact functions using historical trade data from 1996 and deriving the optimal execution strategies. We also perform several Monte Carlo simulation experiments to compare the performance of the optimal strategy to several alternatives.

We examine the implications of portfolio theory for the cross-sectional behavior of equity trading volume. We begin by showing that a two-fund separation theorem suggests a natural definition for trading volume: share turnover. If two-fund separation holds, share turnover must be identical for all securities. If (K+1)-fund separation holds, we show that share turnover satisfies and approximate linear K-factor structure, These implications are empirically tested using weekly turnover data for NYSE and AMEX securities from 1962 to 1996. We find strong evidence against two-fund separation and an eigenvalue decomposition suggests that volume is driven by a two-factor linear model. Click here to download Trading Volume and the MiniCRSP Database: An Introduction and User’s Guide for instructions on how to create your own MiniCRSP database.

In this paper we study the tracking error resulting from the discrete-time application of continuous-time delta-hedging procedures for European options. We characterize the asymptotic distribution of the tracking error as the number of discrete time periods increases, and its joint distribution with other assets. We introduce the notion of temporal granularity of the continuous-time stochastic model that enables us to characterize the degree to which discrete-time approximations of continuous time models track the payoff of the option. We derive closed form expressions for the granularity for a put and call option on a stock that follows a geometric Brownian motion and a mean-reverting process. These expressions offer insight into the tracking error involved in applying continuous-time delta-hedging in discrete time. We also introduce alternative measures of the tracking error and analyze their properties.

For over half a century, financial experts have regarded the movements of markets as a random walk--unpredictable meanderings akin to a drunkard's unsteady gait--and this hypothesis has become a cornerstone of modern financial economics and many investment strategies. Here Andrew W. Lo and A. Craig MacKinlay put the Random Walk Hypothesis to the test. In this volume, which elegantly integrates their most important articles, Lo and MacKinlay find that markets are not completely random after all, and that predictable components do exist in recent stock and bond returns. Their book provides a state-of-the-art account of the techniques for detecting predictabilities and evaluating their statistical and economic significance, and offers a tantalizing glimpse into the financial technologies of the future.

This guide provides details on how to access the MiniCRSP database and reports the results of some exploratory data analysis of trading volume. MiniCRSP contains daily as well as weekly-aggregated data derived from the CRSP Stocks daily file. MiniCRSP comprises returns, turnover, and other data items of research interest, at daily and weekly frequencies, stored in a format such that storage space and access times are minimized. A set of access routines is provided to enable the data to be read via either sequential and random access methods on almost any machine platform.

We derive dynamic optimal trading strategies that minimize the expected cost of trading a large block of equity over a fixed time horizon. Specifically, given a fixed block S of shares to be executed within a fixed finite number of periods T, and given a price-impact function that yields the execution price of an individual trade as a function of the shares traded and market conditions, we obtain the optimal sequence of trades as a function of market conditions—closed-form expressions in some cases—that minimizes the expected cost of executing S within T periods. Our analysis is extended to the portfolio case in which price impact across stocks can have an important effect on the total cost of trading a portfolio.

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow-Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density [SPD]. We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The SPD estimator provides an arbitrage-free method of pricing new, more complex, or less liquid securities while capturing those features of the data that are most relevant from an asset-pricing perspective, e.g., negative skewness and excess kurtosis for asset returns, volatility "smiles" for option prices. We perform Monte Carlo simulation experiments to show that the SPD estimator can be successfully extracted from option prices and we present an empirical application using S&P 500 index options.

The past twenty years have seen an extraordinary growth in the use of quantitative methods in financial markets. Finance professionals now routinely use sophisticated statistical techniques in portfolio management, proprietary trading, risk management, financial consulting, and securities regulation. This graduate-level textbook is intended for PhD students, advanced MBA students, and industry professionals interested in the econometrics of financial modeling. The book covers the entire spectrum of empirical finance, including: the predictability of asset returns, tests of the Random Walk Hypothesis, the microstructure of securities markets, event analysis, the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Arbitrage Pricing Theory, the term structure of interest rates, dynamic models of economic equilibrium, and nonlinear financial models such as ARCH, neural networks, statistical fractals, and chaos theory.

The efficient markets hypothesis is one of the most controversial and hotly contested ideas in all the social sciences. It is disarmingly simply to state, has far-reaching consequences for academic pursuits and business practice, and yet is surprisingly resilient to empirical proof or refutation. Even after three decades of research and literally thousands of journal articles, economists have not yet reached a consensus about whether markets - particularly financial markets - are efficient or not.

We construct portfolios of stocks and of bonds that are maximally predictable with respect to a set of ex ante observable economic variables, and show that these levels of predictability are statistically significant, even after controlling for data-snooping biases. We disaggregate the sources for predictability by using several asset groups—sector portfolios, market-capitalization portfolios, and stock/bond/utility portfolios—and find that the sources of maximal predictability shift considerably across asset classes and sectors as the return-horizon changes. Using three out-of-sample measures of predictability—forecast errors, Merton's market-timing measure, and the profitability of asset allocation strategies based on maximizing predictability—we show that the predictability of the maximally predictable portfolio is genuine and economically significant.

The regulation of financial markets has for years been the domain of lawyers, legislators, and lobbyists. In this unique volume, experts in industrial organization, finance, and law, as well as members of regulatory agencies and the securities industry, examine the securities industry from an economic viewpoint.

Ten original essays address topics including electronic trading and the "virtual"stock exchange; trading costs and liquidity on the London and Tokyo Stock Exchanges and in the German and Japanese government bond markets; international coordination among regulatory agencies; and the impact of changing margin requirements on stock prices, volatility, and liquidity.

This clear presentation of groundbreaking research will appeal to economists, lawyers, and legislators who seek a refreshingly new perspective on policy issues in the securities industry.