EDHEC Publications
Improved Estimates of Higher-Order Comoments and Implications for Portfolio Selection
2010
In the presence of non-normally distributed asset returns, optimal portfolio selection techniques require estimates for variance-covariance parameters, along with estimates for higher-order moments and comoments of the return distribution. This is a formidable challenge that severely exacerbates the dimensionality problem already present with mean-variance analysis. This paper extends the existing literature, which has mostly focused on the covariance matrix, by introducing improved estimators for the coskewness and cokurtosis parameters. A revisited version of this paper was published in the...
Efficient Indexation: An Alternative To Cap-Weighted Indices
2010
This paper introduces a novel method for the construction of equity indices that, unlike their cap-weighted counterparts, offer an efficient risk/return tradeoff. The index construction method goes back to the roots of modern portfolio theory and focuses on the tangency portfolio, the portfolio that weights index constituents so as to obtain the highest possible Sharpe ratio. The major challenge is to generate the required input parameters in a robust manner. A revisited version of this working paper was published in the Fourth Quarter 2011 issue of the Journal of Investment Management.
Has There Been Excessive Speculation in the US Oil Futures Markets? - What Can We (Carefully) Conclude from New CFTC Data?
2009
Because many facets of the global oil markets have not been sufficiently transparent, it is unclear how much of the oil-price rally that peaked in July 2008 can be put down to speculation. This uncertainty has led to concerns that there was actually excessive speculation in the oil derivatives markets. In an effort to make the oil markets more transparent, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has recently launched the “Disaggregated Commitments of Traders” report. This report includes three years of enhanced market-participant data for twenty-two commodity futures contracts. This...
Fairness in Trading — A Microeconomic Interpretation
2009
We show that non-linear transaction costs generate external effects between accounts due to trade volume dependent marginal transaction costs. For an asset manager with multiple clients this raises the question of fairness. How do I ensure I treat all clients fairly? In general, two possible solutions exist. A revisited version of this paper was published in the Winter 2010 issue of the Journal of Trading.
An Alternative Route to Performance Hypothesis Testing
2009
A wide variety of risk–return ratios is routinely reported in sales pitches as well as academic publications. Few attempts have been made, however, to look at the small sample distributions of these estimators in order to derive confidence bands. The reason for this has been the extreme difficulty of working out the required statistics for most risk–return ratios.
A Note On Portfolio Choice For Sovereign Wealth Funds
2009
The vast current account surpluses of commodity-rich nations, combined with record current account deficits in developed markets (US, Britain), have created a new type of investor. Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are instrumental in deciding how these surpluses will be invested. A revisited version of this paper was published in Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Vol. 23, 2009, Nº 3.
Real Estate Indexing and the EDHEC IEIF Commercial Property (France) Index
2009
This paper serves as background literature to the new index and outlines its features and characteristics. First, the importance and the specific characteristics of the real estate market as well as the available real estate investment vehicles are presented. Second, the challenges and problems involved in real estate indexing are discussed. Third, the French real estate market, as the market underlying the index, is described. Fourth, the construction methodology of and the rationale for the EDHEC IEIF Commercial Property (France) Index are discussed in more detail. Fifth and last, this...
Portfolio Choice For Oil-Based Sovereign Wealth Funds
2009
Given recent interest in the activities of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), this paper reviews the financial economics of portfolio choice for oil-based investors. It views the optimal asset allocation problem of a sovereign wealth fund as the decision-making problem of an investor with non-tradable endowed wealth (oil reserves). Optimal portfolios combine speculative demand (optimal growth) as well as hedging demand (hedging resource fluctuation risk) and the level of risk taking should depend both on the fraction of financial wealth to resource wealth and on the oil shock hedging properties...
Reactions To An EDHEC Study On The Impact Of Regulatory Constraints On The ALM Of Pension Funds
2009
EDHEC surveyed pension funds, their advisers, their regulators, their fiduciary managers, and their asset managers for their reactions to an EDHEC study entitled "Impact of regulations on the ALM of European pension funds. The call for reaction elicited 142 non-blank responses and is the first international survey in which both regulatory constraints and the means of managing them—modern ALM techniques—are assessed jointly.
IAS 19: Penalising changes ahead
2009
Financial reporting standards for pension funds are of great topical interest. The current crisis points to the need for clearer regulations, both accounting and prudential, and for regulations that provide better incentives for pension funds to manage risk and to contribute to a more stable pension system. Poorly designed regulations will lead to the closure of defined-benefit pension plans. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has proposed a revision of IAS 19. In the current paper we show that the immediate recognition of the volatility of pension surpluses and deficits in...
A Welcome European Commission Consultation on the UCITS Depositary Function, a Hastily Considered Proposal
2009
The European Commission is seeking to harmonise the depositary fonction and to strengthen protection mechanisms. EDHEC believes that beforehand there should be an in-depth study of the practices of the parties in the value chain and the regulations to which they are subject and that, beyond a minimum protective threshold, complementary protection should be optional, which supposes clear disclosures of the degree of protection and of its cost.
Asset-Liability Management In Private Wealth Management
2009
While the private banking industry is in general relatively well equipped on the tax planning side, with tools that can allow private bankers to analyse the situation of high net worth individuals operating offshore or in multiple tax jurisdictions, the software packages used on the financial simulation side often suffer from significant limitations and cannot satisfy the needs of a sophisticated clientele. In fact, most financial software packages used by private bankers to generate asset allocation recommendations rely on single-period mean-variance asset portfolio optimisation, a tactic...
Regulating Private Financial Institutions: How to Kill the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs
2009
Following the 2008 financial crisis, private financial institutions such as hedge funds and private equity funds have been faced with multiple calls for their regulation, both for consumer protection and systemic reasons. Various proposals for a new regulation have been made and are currently under discussion. The hedge fund community is also open to reasonable regulations. In this paper, we discuss some of the key aspects of the SEC and the European Union proposals and argue that both of them suffer from severe shortcomings. A revisited version of this paper was published in the Journal of...
Macroeconomic Risk Management For Oil Stabilization Funds In GCC Countries
2009
The existence of oil stabilization funds as the largest category of sovereign wealth funds relies on oil prices as a main source of macroeconomic risk for oil exporting countries. Given the often contingent spending policies of oil stabilization funds (accumulating wealth when oil prices are rising and spending wealth to support the local economy when GDP is shrinking) it is important to understand the magnitude and relative importance of oil price shocks relative to other sources of macroeconomic risk. A revisited version of this working paper was published in issue nº 109 (December 2010) of...
Madoff: A Riot of Red Flags
2009
For more than seventeen years, Bernard Madoff operated what was viewed as one of the most successful investment strategies in the world. This strategy ultimately collapsed in December 2008 in what financial experts are calling one of the most detrimental Ponzi schemes in history. Many large and otherwise sophisticated bankers, hedge funds, and funds of funds have been hit by his alleged fraud. In this paper, we review some of the red flags that any operational due diligence and quantitative analysis should have identified as a concern before investing. We highlight some of the salient...
Shackling Short Sellers: The 2008 Shorting Ban
2009
In September 2008, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) surprised the investment community by adopting an emergency order that temporarily banned most short sales in nearly 1,000 financial stocks. In this paper, we study changes in stock prices, the rate of short sales, the aggressiveness of short sellers, and various liquidity measures before, during, and after the shorting ban. We match banned stocks to a control group of non-banned stocks in order to identify these effects.
Optimal Interest Rate Smoothing under Model Ambiguity
2009
This paper solves for the equilibrium of a standard real business cycle model with money under model ambiguity. It first shows that monetary certainty is a sufficient condition for an interest rate smoothing rule to be optimal even under preferences for model robustness on the part of private agents. It then derives the necessary and sufficient condition for a stochastic (but stationary) monetary policy to reproduce the equilibrium of the real economy and compute the optimal (constant) level of the nominal interest rate. A revisited version of this paper was published in the December 2012...
Performance of Passive Hedge Fund Replication Strategies
2009
In this paper we extend Hasanhodzic and Lo (2007) by assessing the out-of-sample performance of various non-linear and conditional hedge fund replication models. We find that going beyond the linear case does not necessarily enhance the replication power. On the other hand, we find that selecting factors on the basis of an economic analysis can lead to a substantial improvement in out-of-sample replication quality, whatever the underlying form of the factor model. A revisited version of this paper was published in the March 2010 issue of European Financial Management.
Solvency II: An Internal Opportunity to Manage the Performance of Insurance Companies
2009
Since the turn of the millennium, a profound shift in the management of insurance companies has been underway. The main catalysts of this shift are the growing complexity of risks, the sophistication of the means of measuring them, and the demands made by investors for greater transparency and for higher-quality management. In this environment, prudential (Solvency II) and accounting (IFRS) requirements must also adapt to create new frameworks offering a better view of the risks borne by companies. All insurers, regardless of their characteristics (public companies, mutual insurers, provident...
MiFID: One Year On
2009
This position paper looks at the changes that have been effected in the European capital markets more than one year after the implementation of MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive). These changes are hard to quantify, but initial fears of the rise of so-called dark pools of liquidity have proven well founded. In addition, the best execution obligation remains ambiguous. The paper examines other features of the post-MiFID trade execution landscape and recommends that post-trade reporting be standardised, that a single measure of execution quality be adopted, and that the debate...
The Survival of Exchange-Listed Hedge Funds
2009
This paper attempts to determine whether exchange-listed hedge funds experience longer lifetimes than non-listed funds, even after factors known to affect survival, such as size and performance, are considered. The Kaplan-Meier estimator is used to compare survival times of listed and non-listed funds. The Cox proportional hazards model is used to make the same comparison, but by controlling for additional factors. The accelerated failure time (AFT) regression model is used to estimate the median survival time of hedge funds, based on values of explanatory variables. A revisited version of...
The EDHEC European ETF Survey 2009
2009
The EDHEC European ETF Survey 2009 presents the results of a comprehensive survey of 360 institutional investors and private wealth managers conducted in January and February 2009. It also provides an overview of the ETF market and of the mechanisms behind ETFs, and shows how advanced techniques involving dynamic allocation strategies can be carried out with ETFs, in particular to implement the beneficial core-satellite approach to investment.
Measuring The Benefits Of Dynamic Asset Allocation Strategies In The Presence Of Liability Constraints
2009
The recent pension crisis has triggered a fierce debate in most developed countries between advocates of a tighter regulation designed to provide explicit incentives for pension funds to increase their focus on risk management, and those arguing that imposing short-term funding constraints and solvency requirements on such long-term investors would only increase the cost of pension financing. We analyse this question in the context of a formal continuous-time dynamic asset allocation model for an investor facing liability commitments subject to inflation and interest rate risks. In an...
The Undesirable Effects of Banning Short Sales
2009
An in-depth study of the short-selling market calls into question both the reasons for the decision to ban short selling and the prejudices that weigh on those who short. According to recently published data (for the United States in particular), a large majority of short sellers are market makers who are hedging their bets on the options markets. They were not affected by the ban, which means that those who were using options to take synthetic short positions continued to do so. The others involved in short selling are mainly hedge funds.
The European Pension Fund Industry Again Beset By Deficits
2009
In 2003, the pension fund industry was severely affected by the steep fall in equity prices and the fall in interest rates. This fall and its consequences led to broad regulatory changes and spurred work on asset and liability management theory and techniques. But it seems that these new regulations and techniques have not enabled the pension fund industry to weather the current return of the perfect storm? This study examines recent publications and looks into the reasons for the fall in funding ratios.
Forecasting changes in equity risk premia of international markets: An error correction approach
2009
This paper uses an error correction model in order to predict the changes in equity risk premia for a set of emerging markets and the US market. It analyses the period 2001-2006 for different forecasting horizons and considers different sub-samples. Using fundamental financial ratios and including variables such as the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index, the paper finds some evidence of predictability of equity risk premia for these markets. Other preliminary results include the tests of stationarity for all the variables and evidence is found of cointegration among some of the...
The Impact of Regulations on the ALM of European Pension Funds
2009
This study analyses the impact of prudential and accounting constraints on the asset-liability management (ALM) of European pension funds in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland.
Hedge Fund Performance in 2008
2009
This paper analyses twelve years of data on EDHEC Alternative Indexes for different hedge fund strategies to provide some perspective on their performance. The extraordinary events of 2008 were not without an impact on hedge fund returns. Funds of hedge funds lost 17% in 2008, posting their worst annual returns since we began keeping records in 1997. Hedge fund investments lost value across the board. Except for CTAs and Short Sellers, all strategies posted their worst losses in 2008. Even after the impact of a calamitous year, half the strategies still post cumulative returns above 100% for...
The Basel II Reform That Would Have Made Most Injections of Public Funds Unnecessary
2009
The financial crisis has put great pressure on banks and led to a number of emergency measures intended to restore confidence in the banking system: tentative changes to accounting standards, recapitalisation of the banking industry, and higher capital requirements. Each measure targets a specific concern that has arisen during the crisis. Governments and regulators, however, have yet to deal with one of the essential causes of systemic risk: the inflexibility of prudential regulation for banking. As it happens, a single minor change would make it possible to restore much of the confidence in...
A Long Road Ahead for Portfolio Construction: Practitioners' Views of an EDHEC Survey
2009
The EDHEC European Investment Practices Survey 2008 (EDHEC 2008) sheds light on current practices in the industry and compares these practices with the recent state of the art as described in the investment literature. The results of the survey show that the industry does not fully exploit a number of proven portfolio optimisation techniques that research has made readily available, such as management of extreme risks, improved covariance estimation or Bayesian and resampling techniques. We called for reactions to these results; the objective was to get feedback from the European industry on...
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About EDHEC
Operating from campuses in Lille, Nice, Paris, London and Singapore, EDHEC is one of the world’s top 15 business schools. Fully international and directly connected to the business world, EDHEC commands a strong reputation for research excellence and the ability to train entrepreneurs and managers capable of breaking new ground. EDHEC functions as a genuine laboratory of ideas and produces innovative solutions valued by businesses. The School’s teaching is inspired by its research work and a focus on “learning by doing”, all with the aim of equipping people with the skills to succeed in business.
