While mainstream financial theories and applications assume that asset returns are normally distributed and individual preferences are quadratic, the overwhelming empirical evidence shows otherwise. Indeed, most of the asset returns exhibit “fat-tails” distributions and investors exhibit asymmetric preferences. These empirical findings lead to the development of a new area of research dedicated to the introduction of higher order moments in portfolio theory and asset pricing models. Multi-moment asset pricing is a revolutionary new way of modeling time series in finance which allows various degrees of long-term memory to be generated. It allows risk and prices of risk to vary through time enabling the accurate valuation of long-lived assets. This book presents the state-of-the art in multi-moment asset allocation and pricing models and provides many new developments in a single volume, collecting in a unified framework theoretical results and applications previously scattered throughout the financial literature. The topics covered in this comprehensive volume include: four-moment individual risk preferences, mathematics of the multi-moment efficient frontier, coherent asymmetric risks measures, hedge funds asset allocation under higher moments, time-varying specifications of (co)moments and multi-moment asset pricing models with homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. Written by leading academics, Multi-moment Asset Allocation and Pricing Models offers a unique opportunity to explore the latest findings in this new field of research.

Advances in Quantitative Asset Management contains selected articles which, for the most part, were presented at the `Forecasting Financial Markets' Conference. `Forecasting Financial Markets' is an international conference on quantitative finance which is held in London in May every year. Since its inception in 1994, the conference has grown in scope and stature to become a key international meeting point for those interested in quantitative finance, with the participation of prestigious academic and research institutions from all over the world, including major central banks and quantitative fund managers. The editor has chosen to concentrate on advances in quantitative asset management and, accordingly, the papers in this book are organized around two major themes: advances in asset allocation and portfolio management, and modelling risk, return and correlation.

The conventional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) has come under severe attack for its failure to reflect investor behavior. This paper describes financial decision-making under uncertainty in formal mathematical terms as a generalized higher-moment capital asset pricing model. It develops that model through the Taylor series expansion of the logarithm of expected financial returns. This mathematical expedient treats the conventional two-moment CAPM and a four-moment variant (expressed in terms of mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) as convenient, mentally tractable special cases of a generalized higher-moment model.This paper then explores the theoretical implications and legal applications of higher-moment asset pricing. In prospect theory, perhaps the best known expression of behavioral economics, a “fourfold pattern” of decisionmaking under uncertainty predicts risk-seeking behavior in particular circumstances. Skewness preference arises in a wide variety of economic settings. Diverse bodies of financial regulation address transactions that strongly resemble legalized gambling, ranging from prize-linked savings to initial public offerings. Over time, cycles of misperception of risk and return consistent with the “disposition effect” of behavioral finance generate systematic gaps between hypothetical investment returns and actual returns realized by investors.

Résumé en anglais

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Berlin, course: Financial Management, language: English, abstract: In everything you do, or don't do, there is a chance that something will happen that you didn't count on. Risk is the potential for unexpected things to happen. Risk aversion is a common thing among almost all investors. Investors generally dislike uncertainty or risk and agree that a safe dollar is worth more than a risky one. Therefore, investors will have to be persuaded to take higher risk by the offer of higher returns. In this investment context, the additional compensation for taking on higher risk is a higher rate of return.Every investment has a risk element: The investor will always not be certainwhether the investment will be able to generate the required income. The degree of risk defers from industry to industry but also from company to company. It is not possible to eliminate the investment risk altogether but to reduce is. Nevertheless, often there remains a risky part. According to the degree of risk, the investor demands a corresponding rate of return that is, of course, higher than the rate of return of risk-free investments. Taking on a risk should be paid off. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is an economic model for valuing stocks, securities, derivatives and/or assets by relating risk and expected rate of return. CAPM is based on the idea that investors demand additional expected return if they are asked to accept additional risk.