Download as PDF Introduction The expected excess market return, or equity risk premium, is an unobservable element crucial in many financial applications ranging from corporate finance to asset pricing. Over the years, many researchers have studied the expected market return by tackling the estimation from different perspectives leading Welch, Goyal Read more…
Download as PDF The First Reaction One of the first institutional proposals for a reform of LIBOR came from the Weathley Review of LIBOR. Commissioned in late June 2012 by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, it has been driven by Martin Weathley, former managing director of the Financial Services Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction Since the 2008 Crisis, several events have undermined the global trust in the major financial benchmarks. Above all, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) had its reputation impaired, and its role weakened. The spike in its value after the collapse and bail-out of leading banks posed Read more…
Download as PDF The purpose of this special report is to introduce the emerging class of rough volatility models. Rough volatility is a relatively new concept originating from the empirical observation that log-volatility essentially behaves as a fractional Brownian motion at any reasonable timescale. While rough volatility is found to Read more…
Download as PDF US US market ended another wild trading week with a slight gain after last Friday substantive losses. S&P500 closed at 2,972.37, with a weekly gain of 0.61%. Dow-Jones Industrial Average Index (DJIA) was up 1.79% reaching 25,864.78. The demand for haven assets is rising and the bets Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction Interest rates have been persistently low across several advanced economies since the Global Financial Crisis. As short- and medium-term rates approached zero, central banks were compelled to turn to increasingly forceful measures in order to provide an adequate monetary stimulus. In 2012, the Danish National Bank Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction Back in December we published an Article called “Democratic Primaries: A markets perspective” in which we provided an overview of the most significant Democratic candidates, namely Berny Sanders and Elizabeth Warren from a more liberal, left-wing side and Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg from a more Read more…
Download as PDF United States The US markets experienced the worst week since 2008 due to a massive sell off caused by coronavirus uncertainty. S&P500 closed at 2954.22 with a weekly loss of a staggering 11.50% whilst the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index finished the week at 25.409, down 12.00% Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction In many financial studies the default assumption is that changes in prices are random and independent between different financial instruments. Opposing studies, thus, are often concerned with discovering dependencies and whether they are driven by common economic factors. One approach to the problem are network graphical Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction We have touched upon the new trend of ESG factors shaping investors preferences in the “Green Bonds Boom” article published in the last semester. This time around we will try to analyze how environmental, social and governance responsibility may be driving equities, in order to see Read more…
Download as PDF Introduction Over the past few years, volatility in the foreign exchange markets has entered a marked downward trend, which ultimately culminated with the signing of the US-China Phase One trade deal in January 2020. This descending movement has characterised both Developed and Emerging Markets currency pairs and Read more…
Download as PDF With the equity markets being arguably reluctant to consider the potential threats to global growth stemming from the Corona virus outbreak (COVID-19), the commodities market experienced quite large price movements over the past month. While we clearly acknowledge that commodity prices are more directly affected by an Read more…
Download as PDF United States US markets started the week on Tuesday after remaining closed on Monday for the Presidents Day holiday on an upbeat tone, the bears took over sentiment for the second half of the week leading to losses on the week, with the S&P500 closing at 3,337 Read more…
Introduction In this article, together with a brief introduction to the use of option-implied information in forecasting, we would like to give an answer to the question: does Option-Implied Skewness and Kurtosis improve the predictive power of (Squared) Implied Volatilities on Future Realised Variance? In order to do so, we Read more…
In our previous article, REITs: Is Liquid Real Estate the Solution for the Late Cycle? – Part 1 (https://bsic.it/reits-is-liquid-real-estate-the-solution-for-the-late-cycle-part-1/), we looked at the business cycle and historical REIT returns during its different phases. While some of the findings point to REITs as potential additions for a late-cycle portfolio, this article Read more…