When the pricing kernel is U-shaped, then expected returns of claims with payout on the upside are negative for strikes beyond a threshold, determined by the slope of the U-shaped kernel in its increasing region, and have negative partial derivative with respect to strike in the increasing...

Based on data until the mid 2000s, oil price changes were shown to predict international equity index returns with a negative predictive slope. Extending the sample to 2015, we document that this relationship has been reversed over the last ten years and therefore has not been stable over time....

Daily asset returns are modeled using self decomposable limit laws and the structure is used to estimate the density of the uncentered data. Estimates of mean returns are a byproduct of the density estimate. Estimates of mean returns via density estimation have significantly lower standard...

This paper presents an option positioning that allows us to infer forward variances from option portfolios. The forward variances we construct from equity index options help to predict (i) growth in measures of real economic activity, (ii) Treasury bill returns, (iii) stock market returns, and...

Allowing for correlated squared returns across two consecutive periods, portfolio theory for two periods is developed. This correlation makes it necessary to work with non-Gaussian models. The two period conic portfolio problem is formulated and implemented. This development leads to a mean ask...

Three particular models of dependence in asset returns with non-Gaussian marginals are investigated on daily return data for sector exchange traded funds. The first model is a full rank Gaussian copula (FGC). The second models returns as a linear mixture of independent Lévy processes (LML). The...

This paper uses a dataset of more than 900,000 news stories to test whether news predicts stock returns. We measure sentiment with the Harvard psychosocial dictionary used by Tetlock, Saar-Tsechansky, and Macskassy (2008), the financial dictionary of Loughran and McDonald (2011), and a...

Models of dependence in asset returns with non-Gaussian marginals are investigated on ETF daily return data. The first is a full rank Gaussian copula. The second is a linear mixture of independent Lévy processes. The third correlates Gaussian components in a variance gamma representation. On a...