In this article we have reviewed “Modern Portfolio Analysis” and outlined some important topics for further research. Issues discussed include the history and future of portfolio theory, the key inputs necessary to perform portfolio optimization, specific problems in applying portfolio theory to financial institutions, and the methods for evaluating how well portfolios are managed. Emphasis is placed on both the history of major concepts and where further research is needed in each of these areas.

Over 26% of investment company assets are held in passively managed vehicles. Thus, it is important to understand what affects the performance of passive vehicles and how to choose among the multiple passive options following any index. This paper examines the factors that are important in explaining differences across funds following the same index and demonstrates how to select a passive vehicle that has a high probability of having the best performance in the following years.

This paper examines asset pricing theories for treasury bonds using longer maturities than previous studies and employing a simple multi-factor model. We allow bond factor loadings to vary over time according to term structure variables. The model examines not only the time variation in the expected returns of bonds but also their unexpected returns. This allows us to explicitly test some asset pricing restrictions which are difficult to study under existing frameworks. We confirm that the pure expectation theory of the term structure of interest rates is rejected by the data. Our empirical study of a two-factor model finds substantial evidence of time-varying term-premiums and factor loadings. The fact that factor loadings vary with long-term interest rates and yield spreads suggest that bond return volatilities are sensitive to interest rate levels.

A number of articles in financial economics have used quarterly or semi-annual mutual fund holdings data to test hypotheses about investment manager behavior. This article reexamines four well-known hypotheses in finance to determine whether the results of prior tests of these hypotheses remain valid when higher frequency (monthly) holdings data are employed. The areas examined are: momentum trading, tax-motivated trading, window dressing, and tournament behavior. We find that the use of monthly holdings data rather than quarterly holdings data or, in the case of tournament behavior, holdings data rather than monthly return data, change, and in some cases reverse, previous results. This occurs because monthly holdings data capture a large number of trades missed by quarterly data (18.5% of the trades) and permit a more precise estimation of the timing of trades.

An important body of literature in Financial Economics accepts bond ratings as a sufficient metric for determining homogeneous groups of bonds for estimating either risk-neutral probabilities or spot rate curves for valuing corporate bonds. In this paper we examine Moody’s and Standard & Poors ratings of corporate bonds and show they are not sufficient metrics for determining spot rate curves and pricing relationships. We investigate several bond characteristics that have been hypothesized as affecting bond prices and show that from among this set of measures default risk, liquidity, tax liability, recovery rate and bond age leads to better estimates of spot curves and for pricing bonds. This has implications for what factors affect corporate bond prices as well as valuing individual bonds.