The History of the Quantitative Methods in Finance Conference Series. 1992-2007

This report charts the history of the Quantitative Methods in Finance (QMF) conference from its beginning in 1993 to the 15th conference in 2007. It lists alphabetically the 1037 speakers who presented at all 15 conferences and the titles of their papers.

Optimal scope of supply chain network & operations design

The increasingly complex supply chain networks and operations call for the development of decision support systems and optimization techniques that take a holistic view of supply chain issues and provide support for integrated decision-making. The economic impacts of optimized supply chain are significant and that has attracted considerable research attention since the late 1990s. This doctoral thesis focuses on developing manageable and realistic optimization models for solving four contemporary and interrelated supply chain network and operations design problems. Each requires an integrated decision-making approach for advancing supply chain effectiveness and efficiency. The first model formulates the strategic robust downsizing of a global supply chain network, which requires an integrated decision-making on resource allocation and network reconfiguration, given certain financial constraints. The second model also looks at the strategic supply chain downsizing problem but extends the first model to include product portfolio selection as a downsizing decision. The third model concerns the redesign of a warranty distribution network, which requires an integrated decision-making on strategic network redesign and tactical recovery process redesign. The fourth model simultaneously determines the operational-level decisions on job assignment and process sequence in order to improve the total throughput of a production facility unit

Application of general semi-infinite Programming to Lapidary Cutting Problems

We consider a volume maximization problem arising in gemstone cutting industry. The problem is formulated as a general semi-infinite program (GSIP) and solved using an interiorpoint method developed by Stein. It is shown, that the convexity assumption needed for the convergence of the algorithm can be satisfied by appropriate modelling. Clustering techniques are used to reduce the number of container constraints, which is necessary to make the subproblems practically tractable. An iterative process consisting of GSIP optimization and adaptive refinement steps is then employed to obtain an optimal solution which is also feasible for the original problem. Some numerical results based on realworld data are also presented

WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, "physics envy" has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an "uncertainty checklist" with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.Comment: v3 adds 2 reference

Model risk analysis for risk management and option pricing

Due to the growing complexity of products in financial markets, market participants rely more and more on quantitative models for trading and risk management decisions. This introduces a fairly new type of risk, namely, model risk. In the first part of this thesis we investigate the quantitative influence of model risk on risk management with a main focus on regulation issues. We present frameworks for measuring model risk and backtesting procedures for evaluating model quality. Furthermore, we apply these frameworks to derivatives portfolios. The second part of the thesis concerns interest rate derivatives pricing models. We compare Libor market and discrete string models and find them observationally equivalent. Furthermore, we investigate the factor dependence and estimation risk for a range of exotic derivatives priced with these models.

Trading foreign exchange carry portfolios

Foreign exchange carry trades involve buying high yielding currencies while selling low yielding currencies. Contrary to the implications of the uncovered interest parity condition, carry trades have generated consistent profits in the past decades. As foreign exchange has gained increased relevance as an asset class in its own, the carry trade emerged as a major driver of foreign exchange market turnover. Given the widespread use and ease of implementation of carry strategies, active currency managers should be evaluated relative to a benchmark which incorporates a proxy for carry trade returns. Within this thesis we study the profitability of various carry portfolio strategies on a very recent data set ranging from the 1st of January 1999 to the 5th of March 2010. Within three distinct empirical chapters we analyse whether different asset allocation, market-timing and money management methodologies have the potential to improve the performance of a simple carry portfolio, such as the one implemented by the Currency Harvest exchange traded fund by Deutsche Bank. Three main findings emerge from our investigation on carry trade portfolios. First, we find that a simple carry trade proxy is difficult to outperform with asset allocation and market-timing techniques. Nevertheless, we would not conclude that professional currency managers should cease to implement carry strategies, since they can add value to the investment process by successfully addressing the issue of optimal leveraging for carry trades. Second, we find that the portfolio flows of carry traders do uncover pockets of predictability in the FX market. Strategies which aim at front-running the trades of carry strategies, do generate positive returns with low correlations to traditional carry trade strategies and therefore offer good diversification vehicles for carry portfolios. Lastly, we find that while profitable market-timing seems feasible on historical backtests, the results are strongly dependent on the correctly timing the credit crisis. Thus, we note that our results are affected by a lookback bias. We posit that before the credit crisis, portfolio managers would not have had the foresight to select the correct market-timing indicators. We thus advocate a broad diversification of risk indicators for carry trade timing