IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/assmgt/v25y2024i1d10.1057_s41260-023-00338-9.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Quantifying the non-Gaussian gain

Author

Listed:
  • David Allen

    (Plato Investment Management
    Honorary Associate of the University of Technology)

  • Stephen Satchell

    (Trinity College, University of Cambridge)

  • Colin Lizieri

    (University of Cambridge)

Abstract

In this paper, we quantify the economic gain from accounting for departures from normality for the mean-variance (MV) investor. We provide two models that account for the key empirical regularities of financial returns: stochastic volatility, asymmetric returns, heavy tails and tail dependence. We show that accounting for departures from normality leads to significant gains in expected utility commensurate with or exceeding typical active management fees. The majority of the uplift in expected utility derives from accounting for stochastic volatility.

Suggested Citation

  • David Allen & Stephen Satchell & Colin Lizieri, 2024. "Quantifying the non-Gaussian gain," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 25(1), pages 1-18, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:assmgt:v:25:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1057_s41260-023-00338-9
    DOI: 10.1057/s41260-023-00338-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41260-023-00338-9
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41260-023-00338-9?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nelson, Daniel B., 1990. "ARCH models as diffusion approximations," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1-2), pages 7-38.
    2. Colin Lizieri & Stephen Satchell & Qi Zhang, 2007. "The Underlying Return‐Generating Factors for REIT Returns: An Application of Independent Component Analysis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 35(4), pages 569-598, December.
    3. Jorion, Philippe, 1991. "Bayesian and CAPM estimators of the means: Implications for portfolio selection," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 717-727, June.
    4. Hwang, Soosung & Satchell, Stephen E, 1999. "Modelling Emerging Market Risk Premia Using Higher Moments," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 4(4), pages 271-296, October.
    5. Alles, Lakshman A & Kling, John L, 1994. "Regularities in the Variation of Skewness in Asset Returns," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 17(3), pages 427-438, Fall.
    6. George Chacko & Luis M. Viceira, 2005. "Dynamic Consumption and Portfolio Choice with Stochastic Volatility in Incomplete Markets," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 18(4), pages 1369-1402.
    7. Gomes, Francisco J., 2007. "Exploiting short-run predictability," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 1427-1440, May.
    8. Andrew Ang & Geert Bekaert, 2002. "International Asset Allocation With Regime Shifts," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 15(4), pages 1137-1187.
    9. Torben G. Andersen & Tim Bollerslev & Francis X. Diebold & Paul Labys, 2003. "Modeling and Forecasting Realized Volatility," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(2), pages 579-625, March.
    10. Michael W. Brandt & Amit Goyal & Pedro Santa-Clara & Jonathan R. Stroud, 2005. "A Simulation Approach to Dynamic Portfolio Choice with an Application to Learning About Return Predictability," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 18(3), pages 831-873.
    11. Beedles, William L., 1979. "On the Asymmetry of Market Returns," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(3), pages 653-660, September.
    12. Victor DeMiguel & Lorenzo Garlappi & Raman Uppal, 2009. "Optimal Versus Naive Diversification: How Inefficient is the 1-N Portfolio Strategy?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(5), pages 1915-1953, May.
    13. Coles, Jeffrey L. & Loewenstein, Uri & Suay, Jose, 1995. "On Equilibrium Pricing under Parameter Uncertainty," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 30(3), pages 347-364, September.
    14. Jun Liu & Francis A. Longstaff & Jun Pan, 2003. "Dynamic Asset Allocation with Event Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(1), pages 231-259, February.
    15. Longstaff, Francis A, 2001. "Optimal Portfolio Choice and the Valuation of Illiquid Securities," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(2), pages 407-431.
    16. Rosenberg, Barr & Ohlson, James A., 1976. "The Stationary Distribution of Returns and Portfolio Separation in Capital Markets: A Fundamental Contradiction," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(3), pages 393-402, September.
    17. Merton, Robert C., 1971. "Optimum consumption and portfolio rules in a continuous-time model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 373-413, December.
    18. Andrew A. Weiss, 1984. "Arma Models With Arch Errors," Journal of Time Series Analysis, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 129-143, March.
    19. repec:bla:jfinan:v:59:y:2004:i:6:p:2809-2834 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Vikas Agarwal, 2004. "Risks and Portfolio Decisions Involving Hedge Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(1), pages 63-98.
    21. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Diebold, Francis X. & Ebens, Heiko, 2001. "The distribution of realized stock return volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 43-76, July.
    22. Pindyck, Robert S, 1984. "Risk, Inflation, and the Stock Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 335-351, June.
    23. Ravi Jagannathan & Tongshu Ma, 2003. "Risk Reduction in Large Portfolios: Why Imposing the Wrong Constraints Helps," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(4), pages 1651-1683, August.
    24. Michael W. Brandt, 1999. "Estimating Portfolio and Consumption Choice: A Conditional Euler Equations Approach," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(5), pages 1609-1645, October.
    25. Ghysels, Eric & Santa-Clara, Pedro & Valkanov, Rossen, 2005. "There is a risk-return trade-off after all," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 509-548, June.
    26. Whitelaw, Robert F, 1994. "Time Variations and Covariations in the Expectation and Volatility of Stock Market Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(2), pages 515-541, June.
    27. Nelson, Daniel B. & Foster, Dean P., 1995. "Filtering and forecasting with misspecified ARCH models II : Making the right forecast with the wrong model," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 303-335, June.
    28. Pulley, Lawrence B., 1981. "A General Mean-Variance Approximation to Expected Utility for Short Holding Periods," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 16(3), pages 361-373, September.
    29. Ang, Andrew & Chen, Joseph, 2002. "Asymmetric correlations of equity portfolios," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(3), pages 443-494, March.
    30. Bloomfield, Ted & Leftwich, Richard & Long, John Jr., 1977. "Portfolio strategies and performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 201-218, November.
    31. Nelson, Daniel B., 1992. "Filtering and forecasting with misspecified ARCH models I : Getting the right variance with the wrong model," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1-2), pages 61-90.
    32. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    33. Yacine AÏT‐SAHALI & Michael W. Brandt, 2001. "Variable Selection for Portfolio Choice," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1297-1351, August.
    34. Glosten, Lawrence R & Jagannathan, Ravi & Runkle, David E, 1993. "On the Relation between the Expected Value and the Volatility of the Nominal Excess Return on Stocks," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(5), pages 1779-1801, December.
    35. Suleyman Basak & Georgy Chabakauri, 2010. "Dynamic Mean-Variance Asset Allocation," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(8), pages 2970-3016, August.
    36. Mitchell, Mark L & Mulherin, J Harold, 1994. "The Impact of Public Information on the Stock Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(3), pages 923-950, July.
    37. Brennan, Michael J. & Schwartz, Eduardo S. & Lagnado, Ronald, 1997. "Strategic asset allocation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 21(8-9), pages 1377-1403, June.
    38. Kan, Raymond & Zhou, Guofu, 2007. "Optimal Portfolio Choice with Parameter Uncertainty," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 42(3), pages 621-656, September.
    39. Kim, Sangbae & In, Francis, 2012. "False discoveries in volatility timing of mutual funds," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(7), pages 2083-2094.
    40. Campbell, John Y., 1987. "Stock returns and the term structure," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 373-399, June.
    41. French, Kenneth R. & Schwert, G. William & Stambaugh, Robert F., 1987. "Expected stock returns and volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 3-29, September.
    42. Lakshman A. Alles & John L. Kling, 1994. "Regularities In The Variation Of Skewness In Asset Returns," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 17(3), pages 427-438, September.
    43. Todd Mitton & Keith Vorkink, 2007. "Equilibrium Underdiversification and the Preference for Skewness," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(4), pages 1255-1288.
    44. Yufeng Han, 2006. "Asset Allocation with a High Dimensional Latent Factor Stochastic Volatility Model," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 19(1), pages 237-271.
    45. Baillie, Richard T & Bollerslev, Tim, 2002. "The Message in Daily Exchange Rates: A Conditional-Variance Tale," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 60-68, January.
    46. Shiller, Robert J, 1981. "Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(3), pages 421-436, June.
    47. Benoit Mandelbrot, 2015. "The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Anastasios G Malliaris & William T Ziemba (ed.), THE WORLD SCIENTIFIC HANDBOOK OF FUTURES MARKETS, chapter 3, pages 39-78, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    48. repec:bla:jfinan:v:58:y:2003:i:4:p:1651-1684 is not listed on IDEAS
    49. Andersen, Torben G & Bollerslev, Tim, 1998. "Answering the Skeptics: Yes, Standard Volatility Models Do Provide Accurate Forecasts," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 885-905, November.
    50. Scott, Robert C & Horvath, Philip A, 1980. "On the Direction of Preference for Moments of Higher Order Than the Variance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 35(4), pages 915-919, September.
    51. Paul A. Samuelson, 1970. "The Fundamental Approximation Theorem of Portfolio Analysis in terms of Means, Variances and Higher Moments," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 37(4), pages 537-542.
    52. Franke, Reiner, 2009. "Applying the method of simulated moments to estimate a small agent-based asset pricing model," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(5), pages 804-815, December.
    53. Kroll, Yoram & Levy, Haim & Markowitz, Harry M, 1984. "Mean-Variance versus Direct Utility Maximization," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 39(1), pages 47-61, March.
    54. Frank J. Fabozzi & Sergio Focardi & Caroline Jonas, 2007. "Trends in quantitative equity management: survey results," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(2), pages 115-122.
    55. Eugene F. Fama, 1963. "Mandelbrot and the Stable Paretian Hypothesis," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 36, pages 420-420.
    56. Levy, H & Markowtiz, H M, 1979. "Approximating Expected Utility by a Function of Mean and Variance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(3), pages 308-317, June.
    57. Merton, Robert C., 1980. "On estimating the expected return on the market : An exploratory investigation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 323-361, December.
    58. Brandt, Michael W. & Kang, Qiang, 2004. "On the relationship between the conditional mean and volatility of stock returns: A latent VAR approach," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 217-257, May.
    59. Campbell R. Harvey & Akhtar Siddique, 2000. "Conditional Skewness in Asset Pricing Tests," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(3), pages 1263-1295, June.
    60. Veronesi, Pietro, 1999. "Stock Market Overreaction to Bad News in Good Times: A Rational Expectations Equilibrium Model," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(5), pages 975-1007.
    61. Westerfield, Janice Moulton, 1977. "An examination of foreign exchange risk under fixed and floating rate regimes," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 181-200, May.
    62. Fleming, Jeff & Kirby, Chris & Ostdiek, Barbara, 2003. "The economic value of volatility timing using "realized" volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 473-509, March.
    63. Yusif Simaan, 1993. "What is the Opportunity Cost of Mean-Variance Investment Strategies?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 39(5), pages 578-587, May.
    64. Simone Alfarano & Thomas Lux & Friedrich Wagner, 2005. "Estimation of Agent-Based Models: The Case of an Asymmetric Herding Model," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 26(1), pages 19-49, August.
    65. Busse, Jeffrey A, 1999. "Volatility Timing in Mutual Funds: Evidence from Daily Returns," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(5), pages 1009-1041.
    66. Engle, Robert F, 1982. "Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity with Estimates of the Variance of United Kingdom Inflation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 987-1007, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yueh-Neng Lin & Ken Hung, 2008. "Is Volatility Priced?," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 9(1), pages 39-75, May.
    2. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Christoffersen, Peter F. & Diebold, Francis X., 2006. "Volatility and Correlation Forecasting," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 777-878, Elsevier.
    3. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Christoffersen, Peter F. & Diebold, Francis X., 2013. "Financial Risk Measurement for Financial Risk Management," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1127-1220, Elsevier.
    4. Penaranda, Francisco, 2007. "Portfolio choice beyond the traditional approach," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 24481, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Eric Jondeau & Michael Rockinger, 2006. "Optimal Portfolio Allocation under Higher Moments," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 12(1), pages 29-55, January.
    6. Eric Jondeau & Michael Rockinger, 2005. "Conditional Asset Allocation under Non-Normality: How Costly is the Mean-Variance Criterion?," FAME Research Paper Series rp132, International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering.
    7. Guidolin, Massimo & Timmermann, Allan, 2007. "Asset allocation under multivariate regime switching," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(11), pages 3503-3544, November.
    8. Peter F. Christoffersen & Francis X. Diebold, 2006. "Financial Asset Returns, Direction-of-Change Forecasting, and Volatility Dynamics," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(8), pages 1273-1287, August.
    9. Turan Bali & Kamil Yilmaz, 2009. "The Intertemporal Relation between Expected Return and Risk on Currency," Koç University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum Working Papers 0909, Koc University-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum, revised Nov 2009.
    10. Sévi, Benoît, 2013. "An empirical analysis of the downside risk-return trade-off at daily frequency," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 189-197.
    11. Ang, Andrew & Liu, Jun, 2007. "Risk, return, and dividends," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(1), pages 1-38, July.
    12. Tobias Adrian & Joshua Rosenberg, 2008. "Stock Returns and Volatility: Pricing the Short‐Run and Long‐Run Components of Market Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2997-3030, December.
    13. Bollerslev, Tim & Engle, Robert F. & Nelson, Daniel B., 1986. "Arch models," Handbook of Econometrics, in: R. F. Engle & D. McFadden (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 49, pages 2959-3038, Elsevier.
    14. Boguth, Oliver & Carlson, Murray & Fisher, Adlai & Simutin, Mikhail, 2011. "Conditional risk and performance evaluation: Volatility timing, overconditioning, and new estimates of momentum alphas," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(2), pages 363-389.
    15. Turan G. Bali & Lin Peng, 2006. "Is there a risk–return trade‐off? Evidence from high‐frequency data," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(8), pages 1169-1198, December.
    16. Detlef Seese & Christof Weinhardt & Frank Schlottmann (ed.), 2008. "Handbook on Information Technology in Finance," International Handbooks on Information Systems, Springer, number 978-3-540-49487-4, September.
    17. Long Chen & Hui Guo & Lu Zhang, 2006. "Equity market volatility and expected risk premium," Working Papers 2006-007, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    18. Mark E. Wohar & David E. Rapach, 2005. "Return Predictability and the Implied Intertemporal Hedging Demands for Stocks and Bonds: International Evidence," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 329, Society for Computational Economics.
    19. Guo, Hui & Savickas, Robert & Wang, Zijun & Yang, Jian, 2009. "Is the Value Premium a Proxy for Time-Varying Investment Opportunities? Some Time-Series Evidence," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 44(1), pages 133-154, February.
    20. Michael W. Brandt & Amit Goyal & Pedro Santa-Clara & Jonathan R. Stroud, 2005. "A Simulation Approach to Dynamic Portfolio Choice with an Application to Learning About Return Predictability," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 18(3), pages 831-873.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:assmgt:v:25:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1057_s41260-023-00338-9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.