Price to earnings ratios are readily observable, but what can they tell us about a market or security?

A look at daily and monthly bitcoin return distributions. Which distribution best describes the observed data. And, what does this mean from a portfolio management perspective?

Probably the most popular models in modern investment management are factor models. Growing out of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), factor models were first theorized in Arbitrage Portfolio Theory and the concept was expanded and applied to risk premiums by Nobel-laureate Eugene Fama and Kenneth French (French, surprisingly, did ...

I spend quite a bit of time at work trying to understand where we are in the business cycle. That analysis informs our capital market expectations, and, by extension, our asset allocation and portfolio risk controls. For years now I have used a trusty old linear regression model, held together ...

Traditional portfolio optimization (often called modern portfolio theory, or mean-variance optimization) balances expected portfolio return with expected portfolio variance. You input how opposed you are to portfolio variance (your risk tolerance), then you build a portfolio that gives you the best return given your risk tolerance. Goals-based investing, by contrast, ...

I started my career in finance in 2007. For about a year I thought “this is great!” Then 2008 hit and I thought “this is terrible!” After 2008, I had one fundamental question that I wanted answered: how much can you lose in an investment portfolio before you’ve lost too much? After ...

I just posted an interesting look at the growth of the labor force by decade. Given that I used R to produce it, I thought it interesting to share the R code and method. Just for reference, here is the chart: First, we will need the following libraries The quantmod ...

I regularly use monte carlo engines to answer questions. First, they are really flexible in their ability to model non-normal distributions and assumptions. Second, you can incorporate any constraints you want which may be outside the scope of a non-linear optimization function. At any rate, this is how to use ...

I’m in the thick of our annual portfolio investment due diligence at work. Basically, this involves surveying all the potential investments we could hold in our portfolios, and then deciding whether we should continue to hold what we own or switch to something else. It is a big job, ...