The past two decades have seen a proliferation of mathematically sophisticated portfolio selection models. Of these, the mean variance (MV), expected utility, and growth optimal (GO) models have received the bulk of attention.

Marc R. Reinganum, A New Empirical Perspective on the CAPM, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 16, No. 4, Proceedings of 16th Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association, June 18-20, 1981, Jackson Hole, Wyoming (Nov., 1981), pp. 439-462

In an efficient capital market, prices fully reflect available information and adjust to new information in a rapid and unbiased fashion. As a result, prices provide unbiased estimates of the underlying values. No known trading rule or security selection strategy which uses only publicly available information would provide an investor with the ability to earn, on average, positive “abnormal” returns in a market that is efficient in the semi-strong sense. Thus, a finding that common stocks selected, using a readily available, widely disseminated set of rules which requires only publicly available information for decision-making purposes, earn, on average, positive abnormal returns represents strong contradictory evidence regarding the semi-strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis.

The form of the Pareto optimal general insurance contract has been investigated by Borch [5], Arrow [3], and Raviv [16]. This paper extends their work to the consideration of the optimal investment portfolio insurance contract. This is a contract whose payoff depends upon the investment performance of some specified portfolio of common stocks. Portfolio insurance differs from general insurance in two important ways. First, investment portfolio insurance lacks the property of stochastic independence between losses on different contracts which is characteristic of general insurance, and this has led some actuaries to question whether portfolio insurance contracts should be sold in view of the risks they pose for the solvency of insurance companies. Recent developments in the theory of option pricing suggest, however, that under certain assumptions an insurance company will be able to eliminate the risks associated with portfolio insurance contracts by following an appropriately defined investment strategy. Secondly, there exists a market for the pricing of investment risks, the securities market; and, under appropriate assumptions, the equilibrium price of portfolio insurance contracts may be determined without specification of the preferences of insurance companies. This permits consideration of insurance company preference functions to be dispensed with, in marked contrast to the earlier literature concerned with general insurance, which treats insurance company preferences symmetrically with those of the insurance purchaser. In addition, since the characteristics of the insured portfolio are known to the insurer, and the performance of the portfolio is beyond the control of the insured, portfolio insurance is not prone to the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard which are liable to arise in general insurance.

In the last few years, several innovations have appeared in mortgage finance which are designed to improve the flow of funds into mortgage lending. Among this group, The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) remains the intermediary which handles the largest share of most mortgage lenders' placements. As a private corporation chartered by Congress and owned by stockholders, FNMA provides a national secondary market facility for government-backed (FHA/VA) and conventional mortgages. Through its secondary market operations, FNMA furnishes a source of liquidity for mortgage lenders with the major portion of this support provided through the Free Market System (FMS) auctions. Through its issuance of forward purchase commitments, the FNMA assures lenders of a permanent investor (at a set yield) for specified periods of time, regardless of changing money market and housing conditions.

Frank J. Fabozzi, Richard R. West, Negotiated Versus Competitive Underwritings of Public Utility Bonds: Just One More Time, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1981), pp. 323-339