We propose a simple analytical framework to measure the value added or subtracted by stoploss rules—predetermined policies that reduce a portfolio’s exposure after reaching a certain threshold of cumulative losses—on the expected return and volatility of an arbitrary portfolio strategy. Using daily futures price data, we provide an empirical analysis of stop-loss policies applied to a buy-and-hold strategy using index futures contracts. At longer sampling frequencies, certain stop-loss policies can increase expected return while substantially reducing volatility, consistent with their objectives in practical applications.

In this paper, we describe a new approach to financing biomedical innovation that we first proposed in Fernandez, Stein, and Lo (2012) and extend in several ways here: using portfolio theory and securitization to reduce the risk of translational medicine. By combining a large number of drug-development projects within a single portfolio, a "megafund," it becomes possible to reduce the investment risk to such an extent that issuing bonds backed by these projects becomes feasible. Debt financing is a key innovation because the cost of each drug-development project can be several hundred million dollars; hence, a sufficiently diversified portfolio may require tens of billions of dollars of investment capital, and debt markets have much greater capacity than either private or public equity markets. If these bonds are structured to have different priorities, the most senior class or “tranche” may be rated by credit-rating agencies, opening up a much larger pool of institutional investors who can purchase such instruments, e.g., pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and foundations. Open-source software available via the link above.

At the fifth annual CFA Institute European Investment Conference on 19 October 2012 in Prague, Robert C. Merton gave a presentation on analyzing and managing macrofinancial risk. This article is based on his talk and on research he carried out with his coauthors.

In this article, the authors run experiments to test if and how human subjects can differentiate time series of actual asset returns from time series that are generated synthetically via various processes, including AR1. In contrast with previous anecdotal evidence, they find that subjects can distinguish between the two. These results show that temporal charts of asset prices convey to investors information that cannot be reproduced by summary statistics. They also provide a first refutation based on human perception of a strong form of the efficient-market hypothesis. Their experiments are implemented via an online video game (http://arora.ccs.neu.edu). The authors also link the subjects’ performance to statistical properties of the data and investigate whether subjects improve performance while playing.

Unlike other industries in which intellectual property is patentable, the financial industry relies on trade secrecy to protect its business processes and methods, which can obscure critical financial risk exposures from regulators and the public. We develop methods for sharing and aggregating such risk exposures that protect the privacy of all parties involved and without the need for a trusted third party. Our approach employs secure multi-party computation techniques from cryptography in which multiple parties are able to compute joint functions without revealing their individual inputs. In our framework, individual financial institutions evaluate a protocol on their proprietary data which cannot be inverted, leading to secure computations of real-valued statistics such as concentration indexes, pairwise correlations, and other single- and multi-point statistics. The proposed protocols are computationally tractable on realistic sample sizes. Potential financial applications include: the construction of privacy-preserving real-time indexes of bank capital and leverage ratios; the monitoring of delegated portfolio investments; financial audits, and the publication of new indexes of proprietary trading strategies.

A significant contributing factor to the Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 was the apparent interconnectedness among hedge funds, banks, brokers, and insurance companies, which amplified shocks into systemic events. In this paper, we propose five measures of systemic risk based on statistical relations among the market returns of these four types of financial institutions. Using correlations, cross-autocorrelations, principal components analysis, regime-switching models, and Granger causality tests, we find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated and less liquid over the past decade, increasing the level of systemic risk in the finance and insurance industries. These measures can also identify and quantify financial crisis periods. Our results suggest that while hedge funds can provide early indications of market dislocation, their contributions to systemic risk may not be as significant as those of banks, insurance companies, and brokers who take on risks more appropriate for hedge funds.

The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.

In this article, we attempt to quantify the potential impact of hedge funds on systemic risk by developing a number of new risk measures for hedge funds and applying them to individual and aggregate hedge-fund returns data. These measures include: illiquidity risk exposure, nonlinear factor models for hedge-fund and banking-sector indexes, logistic regression analysis of hedge-fund liquidation probabilities, and aggregate measures of volatility and distress based on regime-switching models. Our preliminary findings suggest that the hedge-fund industry may be heading into a challenging period of lower expected returns, and that systemic risk is currently on the rise. This is a redacted version of our paper "Systemic Risk and Hedge Funds".

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.