No Arabic abstract
Since decades, the data science community tries to propose prediction models of financial time series. Yet, driven by the rapid development of information technology and machine intelligence, the velocity of todays information leads to high market efficiency. Sound financial theories demonstrate that in an efficient marketplace all information available today, including expectations on future events, are represented in today prices whereas future price trend is driven by the uncertainty. This jeopardizes the efforts put in designing prediction models. To deal with the unpredictability of financial systems, todays portfolio management is largely based on the Markowitz framework which puts more emphasis in the analysis of the market uncertainty and less in the price prediction. The limitation of the Markowitz framework stands in taking very strong ideal assumptions about future returns probability distribution. To address this situation we propose PAGAN, a pioneering methodology based on deep generative models. The goal is modeling the market uncertainty that ultimately is the main factor driving future trends. The generative model learns the joint probability distribution of price trends for a set of financial assets to match the probability distribution of the real market. Once the model is trained, a portfolio is optimized by deciding the best diversification to minimize the risk and maximize the expected returns observed over the execution of several simulations. Applying the model for analyzing possible futures, is as simple as executing a Monte Carlo simulation, a technique very familiar to finance experts. The experimental results on different portfolios representing different geopolitical areas and industrial segments constructed using real-world public data sets demonstrate promising results.
In mathematical finance and other applications of stochastic processes, it is frequently the case that the characteristic function may be known but explicit forms for density functions are not available. The simulation of any distribution is greatly facilitated by a knowledge of the quantile function, by which uniformly distributed samples may be converted to samples of the given distribution. This article analyzes the calculation of a quantile function direct from the characteristic function of a probability distribution, without explicit knowledge of the density. We form a non-linear integro-differential equation that despite its complexity admits an iterative solution for the power series of the quantile about the median. We give some examples including tail models and show how to generate C-code for examples.
We revisit and demonstrate the Epps effect using two well-known non-parametric covariance estimators; the Malliavin and Mancino (MM), and Hayashi and Yoshida (HY) estimators. We show the existence of the Epps effect in the top 10 stocks from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) by various methods of aggregating Trade and Quote (TAQ) data. Concretely, we compare calendar time sampling with two volume time sampling methods: asset intrinsic volume time averaging, and volume time averaging synchronised in volume time across assets relative to the least and most liquid asset clocks. We reaffirm the argument made in much of the literature that the MM estimator is more representative of trade time reality because it does not over-estimate short-term correlations in an asynchronous event driven world. We confirm well known market phenomenology with the aim of providing some standardised R based simulation tools.
This paper studies the extreme dependencies between energy, agriculture and metal commodity markets, with a focus on local co-movements, allowing the identification of asymmetries and changing trend in the degree of co-movements. More precisely, starting from a non-parametric mixture copula, we use a novel copula-based local Kendalls tau approach to measure nonlinear local dependence in regions. In all pairs of commodity indexes, we find increased co-movements in extreme situations, a stronger dependence between energy and other commodity markets at lower tails, and a V-type local dependence for the energy-metal pairs. The three-dimensional Kendalls tau plot for upper tails in quantiles shows asymmetric co-movements in the energy-metal pairs, which tend to become negative at peak returns. Therefore, we show that the energy market can offer diversification solutions for risk management in the case of extreme bull market events.
Optimal portfolio selection problems are determined by the (unknown) parameters of the data generating process. If an investor want to realise the position suggested by the optimal portfolios he/she needs to estimate the unknown parameters and to account the parameter uncertainty into the decision process. Most often, the parameters of interest are the population mean vector and the population covariance matrix of the asset return distribution. In this paper we characterise the exact sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics by deriving their sampling distribution which is present in terms of a stochastic representation. This approach possesses several advantages, like (i) it determines the sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights by expressions which could be used to draw samples from this distribution efficiently; (ii) the application of the derived stochastic representation provides an easy way to obtain the asymptotic approximation of the sampling distribution. The later property is used to show that the high-dimensional asymptotic distribution of optimal portfolio weights is a multivariate normal and to determine its parameters. Moreover, a consistent estimator of optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics is derived under the high-dimensional settings. Via an extensive simulation study, we investigate the finite-sample performance of the derived asymptotic approximation and study its robustness to the violation of the model assumptions used in the derivation of the theoretical results.
We propose a fully data-driven approach to calibrate local stochastic volatility (LSV) models, circumventing in particular the ad hoc interpolation of the volatility surface. To achieve this, we parametrize the leverage function by a family of feed-forward neural networks and learn their parameters directly from the available market option prices. This should be seen in the context of neural SDEs and (causal) generative adversarial networks: we generate volatility surfaces by specific neural SDEs, whose quality is assessed by quantifying, possibly in an adversarial manner, distances to market prices. The minimization of the calibration functional relies strongly on a variance reduction technique based on hedging and deep hedging, which is interesting in its own right: it allows the calculation of model prices and model implied volatilities in an accurate way using only small sets of sample paths. For numerical illustration we implement a SABR-type LSV model and conduct a thorough statistical performance analysis on many samples of implied volatility smiles, showing the accuracy and stability of the method.