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Alternative Thinking

Can Machines Time Markets? The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction

Common wisdom has suggested that small, simple models are best suited for market timing applications, given finance’s “small data” constraint and naturally low predictability. However, we show that complex models better identify true nonlinear relationships and therefore produce better market timing strategy performance. We validate this "virtue of complexity" result in three practical market timing applications.

Working Paper

Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier

We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the "implementable efficient frontier." While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading costs leads to excessive reliance on fleeting small-scale characteristics, resulting in poor net returns. We develop a framework that produces a superior frontier by integrating trading-cost-aware portfolio optimization with machine learning

Journal Article

Enhanced Portfolio Optimization

We show how to identify the portfolios that cause problems in standard mean-variance optimization (MVO) and develop an enhanced portfolio optimization (EPO) method that addresses the problems. Applying EPO on several realistic datasets, we find significant gains relative to standard benchmarks.

Working Paper

Predicting Returns with Text Data

We introduce a new text-mining methodology that extracts sentiment information from news articles to predict asset returns.

Journal Article

Can Machines "Learn" Finance?

Can Machines “Learn” Finance?” was named the winner of the 2020 Harry M. Markowitz Award. Machine learning for asset management faces a unique set of challenges that differ markedly from other domains where machine learning has excelled. We discuss a variety of beneficial use cases and potential pitfalls for machine learning in asset management, and emphasize the importance of economic theory and human expertise for achieving success through financial machine learning.

Working Paper

Hedging Climate Change News

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk and discuss multiple directions for future research on financial approaches to managing climate risk.

Journal Article

Empirical Asset Pricing via Machine Learning

We show how the field of machine learning can be used to empirically investigate asset premia including momentum, liquidity, and volatility.