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.

For instructions on how to create your own MiniCRSP database, please see Trading Volume and the MiniCRSP Database: An Introduction and User’s Guide.

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.

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.

The predictability of an asset's returns will affect option prices on that asset, even though predictability is typically induced by the drift which does not enter the option pricing formula. For discretely-sampled data, predictability is linked to the parameters that do enter the option pricing formula. We construct an adjustment for predictability to the Black-Scholes formula and show that this adjustment can be important even for small levels of predictability, especially for longer-maturity options. We propose several continuous-time linear diffusion processes that can capture broader forms of predictability, and provide numerical examples that illustrate their importance for pricing options.

Data-snooping—finding seemingly significant but in fact spurious patterns in the data—is a serious problem in financial analysis. Although it afflicts all non-experimental sciences, data-snooping is particularly problematic for financial analysis because of the large number of empirical studies performed on the same datasets. Given enough time, enough attempts, and enough imagination, almost any pattern can be teased out of any dataset. In some cases, these spurious patterns are statistically small, almost unnoticeable in isolation. But because small effects in financial calculations can often lead to very large differences in investment performance, data-snooping biases can be surprisingly substantial. In this review article, I provide several examples of data-snooping biases, explain why it is impossible to eliminate them completely, and propose several ways to guard against the most extreme forms of data-snooping in financial analysis.

We propose a nonparametric method for estimating the pricing formula of a derivative asset using learning networks. Although not a substitute for the more traditional arbitrage-based pricing formulas, network pricing formulas may be more accurate and computationally more efficient alternatives when the underlying asset's price dynamics are unknown, or when the pricing equation associated with no-arbitrage condition cannot be solved analytically. To assess the potential value of network pricing formulas, we simulate Black-Scholes option prices and show that learning networks can recover the Black-Scholes formula from a six-month training set of daily options prices, and that the resulting network formula can be used successfully to both price and delta-hedge options out-of-sample. For purposes of comparison, we perform similar simulation experiments for four other methods of estimation: OLS, kernel regression, projection pursuit, and multilayer perceptron networks. To illustrate the practical relevance of our network pricing approach, we apply it to the pricing and delta-hedging of S&P 500 futures options from 1987 to 1991.

The non-trading or non-synchronous effect arises when time series, usually financial asset prices, are taken to be recorded at time intervals of one length when in fact they are recorded at time intervals of another, possibly irregular, lengths. For example, the daily prices of securities quoted in the financial press are usually "closing" prices, prices at which the last transaction in each of those securities occurred on the previous business day. these closing prices generally  do not occur at the same time each day, but by calling them "daily" prices, we have implicitly and incorrectly assumes that they are equally spaces at 24-hour intervals. Such an assumption can generate spurious predictability in price changes and returns even if true price changes or returns are statistically independent. The non-trading effect induces potentially serious biases in the moments and co-moments of asset returns such as their means, variances, covariances, and autocorrelation and cross-autocorrelation coefficients.

The pricing of options, certificates, and other derivatives or assets—financial assets whose payments depend on the prices of other assets—is one of the great successes of modern financial economics. Although the pricing of derivatives is computationally intensive, there is little done in terms of the traditional empirical analysis since by the very nature of the determination of prices and arbitrage there is no error term to minimize. There are, however, many issues of statistical inference that affect the pricing of options and other derivatives. This paper analyzes two of the most common issues neglected in the literature: reduced form empirical instruments for the determination of prices and how to use Monte Carlo simulations to calculate option prices depend on a path.