This study compares direct and indirect methods for estimating own funds in life insurance, finding indirect methods more effective under realistic asset-liability coupling.
problem Computing own funds for life insurers using direct and indirect methods in a risk-neutral pricing framework.
method Introduced a novel family of mixed estimators including both direct and indirect methods, integrated into a control variate framework for variance reduction.
result The indirect method is more effective under realistic asset-liability coupling, but neither method is universally superior.
We illustrate a problem in the self-financing condition used in the papers "Funding beyond discounting: collateral agreements and derivatives pricing" (Risk Magazine, February 2010) and "Partial Differential Equation Representations of Derivatives with Counterparty Risk and Funding Costs" (The Journal of Credit Risk, 2…
This article presents FVA and CVA of a bilateral derivative in a coherent manner, based on recent developments in fair value accounting and ISDA standards. We argue that a derivative liability, after primary risk factors being hedged, resembles in economics an issued variable funding note, and should be priced at the m…
A fund manager invests both the fund's assets and own private wealth in separate but potentially correlated risky assets, aiming to maximize expected utility from private wealth in the long run. If relative risk aversion and investment opportunities are constant, we find that the fund's portfolio depends only on the fu…
It is well known that traded foreign exchange forwards and cross currency swaps (CCS) cannot be priced applying overnight cash and carry arguments as they imply absence of funding advantage of one currency to the other. This paper proposes a heuristic present value concept for multi-currency pricing and hedging which a…
AI platforms disrupt investment by personalizing deal sourcing and insights.
problem Lack of scalable, personalized, and privacy-compliant deal sourcing and insights solutions.
method Development of in-house AI platforms that interact directly with funds and learn from interactions.
result AI platforms provide smarter, personalized use cases for funds, offering a competitive advantage.
Bilateral CVA as currently implement has the counterintuitive effect of profiting from one's own widening CDS spreads, i.e. increased risk of default, in practice. The unified picture of CVA and liquidity introduced by Morini & Prampolini 2010 has contributed to understanding this. However, there are two significant om…
Reverses simplification of risk measurement, focusing on portfolio covariance.
problem Risk measurement for unbenchmarkable global funds.
method Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with AI-generated labels, density-based clustering, and risk scores.
result Reveals true risk factors and identifies slow capital destroyers.
Structuring a viable pension plan is a problem that arises in the study of financial contracts pricing and bears special importance these days. Deterministic pension models often rely on projections that are based on several assumptions concerning the "average" long-time behavior of the stock market. Our aim here is to…
USS fund risk assessment shows low default chance but high overfunding.
problem Risk assessment of Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) fund.
method Estimates risk of default and overfunding using a cautious model.
result Fund has less than 7% chance of defaulting but overfunding by at least £100bn.
We develop an optimal currency hedging strategy for fund managers who own foreign assets to choose the hedge tenors that maximize their FX carry returns within a liquidity risk constraint. The strategy assumes that the offshore assets are fully hedged with FX forwards. The chosen liquidity risk metric is Cash Flow at R…
An uncollateralized swap hedged back-to-back by a CCP swap is used to introduce FVA. The open IR01 of FVA, however, is a sure sign of risk not being fully hedged, a theoretical no-arbitrage pricing concern, and a bait to lure market risk capital, a practical business concern. By dynamically trading the CCP swap, with t…
Value adjustment of uncollateralized trades is determined within a risk-neutral pricing framework. When hedging such trades, investors cannot freely trade protection on their own name, thus facing an incomplete market. This fact is reflected in the non-uniqueness of the pricing measure, which is only constrained by the…
New method for valuing and hedging credit risk when defaults cannot be hedged.
problem Valuation and hedging of counterparty credit risk when there's no protection available.
method Local risk-minimization approach via BSDE (Backward Stochastic Differential Equation)
result Optimal strategy computed for valuing and hedging credit risk.
Within the Own Risk and Solvency Assessment framework, the Solvency II directive introduces the need for insurance undertakings to have efficient tools enabling the companies to assess the continuous compliance with regulatory solvency requirements. Because of the great operational complexity resulting from each comple…
We propose a novel approach for analysis of the composition of an equity mutual fund based on the time series decomposition of the price movements of the individual stocks of the fund. The proposed scheme can be applied to check whether the style proclaimed for a mutual fund actually matches with the fund composition. …
Funds inflate their returns due to price pressure, leading to wealth reallocation and market crashes.
problem Funds inflate their returns due to price pressure, leading to wealth reallocation and market crashes.
method Decomposed fund returns into price pressure and fundamental components, and identified the impact of price chasing on fund flows.
result Funds' self-inflated returns lead to wealth reallocation and market crashes, and can be predicted by fund illiquidity.
This report was originally written as an industry white paper on Hedge Funds. This paper gives an overview to Hedge Funds, with a focus on risk management issues. We define and explain the general characteristics of Hedge Funds, their main investment strategies and the risk models employed. We address the problems in H…
This paper supplies two possible resolutions of Fortune's (2000) margin-loan pricing puzzle. Fortune (2000) noted that the margin loan interest rates charged by stock brokers are very high in relation to the actual (low) credit risk and the cost of funds. If we live in the Black-Scholes world, the brokers are presumabl…
Study on CEF discount in Bangladesh, finds size and maturity impact, turnover negative.
problem Exploring the discount puzzle in closed-end mutual funds in Bangladesh.
method Fixed effects panel regression with diagnostic tests.
result Fund size and maturity positively impact CEF discount, turnover negatively impacts.
Deep learning models predict mutual funds' performance better than traditional methods.
problem Predicting mutual funds' performance accurately.
method Deep learning models (LSTM, GRUs) trained with Bayesian optimization and ensemble methods.
result Ensemble method of LSTM and GRUs achieves the highest accuracy in forecasting mutual funds' Sharpe ratios.
This paper optimizes perpetual contract liquidity by accounting for funding rates.
problem Optimal liquidity provision for perpetual contracts with stochastic funding rates.
method Formulated a control problem, solved with a HJB scheme, and calibrated on real data.
result Funding-aware market making improves performance and reduces inventory risk.
This paper examines the risk-adjusted performance and differential fund flows for socially responsible mutual funds (SRMF). The results show that SRMF rated high on ESG, perform better than lower rated ESG funds during the period of economic crisis. The findings also show that low ESG rated SRMF had higher differential…
Study finds Indian mutual funds adjust cash holdings based on inflows, impacting stock purchases.
problem Active liquidity management by mutual funds in India.
method Examined cash holdings and stock purchases of Indian equity mutual funds.
result Funds with active liquidity choices outperform, highlighting the importance of this strategy.
Blockchain protocol improves traditional mutual funds with performance fees and investor protection.
problem Operational issues and performance fees in traditional mutual funds.
method Developed a blockchain protocol that integrates features of mutual funds and hedge funds.
result Blockchain can simplify performance fee calculations and protect investors.
Study uses machine learning and PolyModel to improve hedge fund performance.
problem Improving hedge fund investment performance with machine learning.
method Integration of machine learning techniques, PolyModel feature selection, and analysis of fund size.
result Machine learning enhances cumulative returns but increases annual volatility.
In this paper we investigate the relationship between Funding Value Adjustment (FVA) and Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR). FVA is defined in a consistent way with NSFR such that the new framework of FVA monitors the costs due to keeping NSFR at an acceptable level, as well. In addition, the problem of choosing the optim…
Study examines Indian equity mutual funds' investment style and risk-shifting.
problem Understanding how Indian equity mutual funds' investment styles affect their returns.
method Estimating size and style beta coefficients, identifying breakpoints, analyzing investment styles, and assessing risk-shifting intensity.
result Funds can enhance returns by shifting to high-return styles like Small Value and Small Blend.
Sparse portfolio strategy from mutual funds' favorite stocks in China A share market.
problem Building a sparse portfolio from mutual funds' favorite stocks in a market with limited fund information.
method Analyzed mutual fund favorite stocks, used portfolio optimizer with constraints, and compared different methods.
result Sparse portfolios consistently outperform the benchmark index 930950.CSI.
Estimates growth loss in fund models and proposes a shrinkage method.
problem Estimating growth loss in fund models under frequentist and Bayesian estimation.
method Proposes a shrinkage method to target maximal growth with minimal deviation.
result Empirical evidence shows shrinkage gives a stable estimate closer to growth potential.
Study uses topic modeling and sentiment analysis to uncover hedge fund performance insights.
problem Hedge fund opacity and limited disclosure make them hard to analyze.
method Applied topic modeling and sentiment analysis to hedge fund documents using DistilBERT and Top2Vec.
result Automated topic modeling and sentiment analysis can predict hedge fund performance.
This paper examines the relationship between Inverse Perpetual Swap contracts, a Bitcoin derivative akin to futures and the margin funding interest rates levied on BitMEX. This paper proves the Heteroskedastic nature of funding rates and goes onto establish a causal relationship between the funding rates and the Bitcoi…
Funding is a cost to trading desks that they see as an input. Current FVA-related literature reflects this by also taking funding costs as an input, usually constant, and always risk-neutral. However, this funding curve is the output from a Treasury point of view. Treasury must consider Regulatory-required liquidity bu…
In this note we sketch an initial tentative approach to funding costs analysis and management for contracts with bilateral counterparty risk in a simplified setting. We depart from the existing literature by analyzing the issue of funding costs and benefits under the assumption that the associated risks cannot be hedge…
New methods for equity fund selection and portfolio construction using mutual fund top holdings.
problem Classic equity fund selection and portfolio construction problems.
method Propose an easy-to-implement framework to produce a long-short portfolio from mutual fund top holdings.
result Generate impressive results and show statistical evidence.
Upper bounds on utility for managing heterogeneous collectivised funds.
problem Managing pension funds with diverse investor preferences and mortality.
method Axiomatic approach to define optimal management strategies.
result Asymptotically optimal strategies for maximizing investor utility.
The proprietary nature of Hedge Fund investing means that it is common practise for managers to release minimal information about their returns. The construction of a Fund of Hedge Funds portfolio requires a correlation matrix which often has to be estimated using a relatively small sample of monthly returns data which…
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have been gaining increasing popularity in the investment community as is evidenced by the high growth both in the number of ETFs and their net assets since 2000. As ETFs are in nature similar to index mutual funds, in this paper we examined if this growing demand for ETFs can be explained …
The study quantifies the impact of fund miscategorization using machine learning.
problem The impact of fund miscategorization on investment decisions.
method Formulated as a distance-based outlier detection problem, used Random Forest based distance metric learning.
result Identified funds with strong relationship to future returns as outliers.
Machine learning categorizes mutual funds for better investment strategies.
problem Identifying similar mutual funds for diversified investment applications.
method Machine learning to learn and reproduce a well-regarded categorization system.
result Machine learning can learn and reproduce a categorization system that is widely regarded.
A new method identifies similar mutual funds using graph learning.
problem Identifying similar mutual funds with nuanced portfolio similarities.
method Node2Vec machine learning method applied to a weighted bipartite network of funds and assets.
result Identifies structural similarity among mutual funds' portfolios.
The paper analyzes fairness of compensation-based risk-sharing schemes for fund payouts.
problem Fair allocation of payouts in an endowment contingency fund.
method Analyzes two types of administrators and general non-negative loss distributions.
result General conditions for actuarial fairness are provided.
Investors in Target Date Funds are automatically switched from high risk to low risk assets as their retirements approach. Such funds have become very popular, but our analysis brings into question the rationale for them. Based on both a model with parameters fitted to historical returns and on bootstrap resampling, we…
By exploiting a bipartite network representation of the relationships between mutual funds and portfolio holdings, we propose an indicator that we derive from the analysis of the network, labelled the Average Commonality Coefficient (ACC), which measures how frequently the assets in the fund portfolio are present in th…
The paper uses clustering and integer programming to optimize stock selection for investment funds.
problem Maximizing profits and minimizing risk in stock markets.
method Data-oriented analysis and clustering techniques with integer programming.
result Reconstructed NASDAQ 100 index fund example demonstrates effectiveness.
Study on pooled annuity funds and how initial savings affect income stability.
problem Analyzing the stability of income payments in pooled annuity funds.
method Examining the influence of initial savings on income fluctuations and developing a criterion for pooling funds.
result Identification of a term, the 'implied number of homogeneous members', linking initial savings to income fluctuations.
We quantify the benefit of collectivised investment funds, in which the assets of members who die are shared among the survivors. For our model, with realistic parameter choices, an annuity or individual fund requires approximately 20\% more initial capital to provide as good an outcome as a collectivised investment fu…
Study optimizes funding rates for cryptocurrency perpetual futures to maintain price alignment.
problem Maintaining alignment between perpetual future prices and target values in cryptocurrency markets.
method Developed replicating portfolios and path-dependent funding rates using path-dependent infinite-horizon BSDEs and arbitrage pricing theory.
result Appropriate funding rate design can keep perpetual future prices aligned with target values.