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We present economically and statistically empirical evidence that the Halloween effect is significant. A trading strategy based on this anomaly works persistently and outperforms the buy and hold strategy in 8 out of 10 indices in our sample.We present evidence that the Halloween strategy works two out of every three calendar years and if an investor followed it "blindly", it would yield an annual average excess of return of approximately 2.4%, compared to the buy and hold strategy and further ensure a significant reduction in risk in all indices (around 7.5% on an annual basis).We have considered several possible explanations for the anomaly, however, none was able to fully justify the seasonal effect. We suggest that a possible explanation may be related to negative average returns during the May-October period, rather than superior performance during the November-April period.

A closed-form pricing solution is proposed for the quality option embedded in Treasury bond futures contracts, under a multifactor and D. Heath, R. Jarrow, and A. Morton (1992) Gaussian framework. Such an analytical solution can be obtained through a conditioning approximation, in the sense of M. Curran (1994) and L. Rogers and Z. Shi (1995), or via a rank 1 approximation, following A. Brace and M. Musiela (1994). Monte Carlo simulations show that both approximations are extremely accurate and easy to calculate.Application of the proposed pricing model to the EUREX market from January 2000 through May 2004, yields an excellent fit and an insignificant estimate of the quality option magnitude. On average, this delivery option accounts for only of the futures prices.The timing option is usually found to be less important than the quality option and arises whenever the futures seller is allowed to select the moment (during the delivery month) that delivery takes place. This is the case for the CBOT futures contracts but not for the EUREX bond futures covered by this article because for the latter, delivery must take place on the 10th calendar day of each (quarterly) delivery month. 2 Such an approach includes, for instance, the analysis of Gay and Manaster (

Using the models proposed by (Treynor & Mazuy, 1966; Henriksson & Merton, 1981), the present study examines the selection and timing abilities of mutual fund managers to denote the practice of these strategies as a means to achieve superior performance. For the 163 European equity mutual funds that followed active management strategies between January 2000 and December 2016, there was no evidence that fund managers used market timing abilities to anticipate the market movements. However, the selectivity component of returns presents slightly positive results, despite the poor overall performance.

Protecting against unexpected yield curve, inflation, and longevity shifts are some of the most critical issues institutional and private investors must solve when managing post-retirement income benefits. This paper empirically investigates the performance of alternative immunization strategies for funding targeted multiple liabilities that are fixed in timing but random in size (inflation-linked), i.e., that change stochastically according to consumer price or wage level indexes. The immunization procedure is based on a targeted minimax strategy considering the M-Absolute as the interest rate risk measure. We investigate to what extent the inflation-hedging properties of ILBs in asset liability management strategies targeted to immunize multiple liabilities of random size are superior to that of nominal bonds. We use two alternative datasets comprising daily closing prices for U.S. Treasuries and U.S. inflation-linked bonds from 2000 to 2018. The immunization performance is tested over 3-year and 5-year investment horizons, uses real and not simulated bond data and takes into consideration the impact of transaction costs in the performance of immunization strategies and in the selection of optimal investment strategies. The results show that the multiple liability immunization strategy using inflation-linked bonds outperforms the equivalent strategy using nominal bonds and is robust even in a nearly zero interest rate scenario. These results have important implications in the design and structuring of ALM liability-driven investment strategies, particularly for retirement income providers such as pension schemes or life insurance companies.