A Clarifying Note on Long-Horizon Investment and Dollar-Cost Averaging: An Effective Investment Exposure Perspective

It is widely claimed in investment education and practice that extending the investment horizon reduces risk, and that diversifying investment timing, for example through dollar-cost averaging (DCA), further mitigates investment risk. Although such claims are intuitively appealing, they are often st

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

A Test of Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

We develop a statistical test to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using state-of-the-art pre-training data detection techniques, we estimate the likelihood that a given prompt appeared in an LLM’s training corpus, a statistic we term Lookahead Pr

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Alpha-R1: Alpha Screening with LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Signal decay and regime shifts pose recurring challenges for data-driven investment strategies in non-stationary markets. Conventional time-series and machine learning approaches, which rely primarily on historical correlations, often struggle to generalize when the economic environment changes. Whi

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Broken Symmetry of Stock Returns -- a Modified Jones-Faddy Skew t-Distribution

We argue that negative skew and positive mean of the distribution of stock returns are largely due to the broken symmetry of stochastic volatility governing gains and losses. Starting with stochastic differential equations for stock returns and for stochastic volatility we argue that the distributio

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Impact of Volatility on Time-Based Transaction Ordering Policies

We study Arbitrum’s Express Lane Auction (ELA), an ahead-of-time second-price auction that grants the winner an exclusive latency advantage for one minute. Building on a single-round model with risk-averse bidders, we propose a hypothesis that the value of priority access is discounted relative to r

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Lambda Expected Shortfall

The Lambda Value-at-Risk (Lambda-VaR) is a generalization of the Value-at-Risk (VaR), which has been actively studied in quantitative finance. Over the past two decades, the Expected Shortfall (ES) has become one of the most important risk measures alongside VaR because of its various desirable prop

December 29, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Beyond Binary Screens: A Continuous Shariah Compliance Index for Asset Pricing and Portfolio Design

Binary Shariah screens vary across standards and apply hard thresholds that create discontinuous classifications. We construct a Continuous Shariah Compliance Index (CSCI) in $[“0,1”]$ by mapping standard screening ratios to smooth scores between conservative ``comfort’’ bounds and permissive outer

December 28, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Deep Learning for Art Market Valuation

We study how deep learning can improve valuation in the art market by incorporating the visual content of artworks into predictive models. Using a large repeated-sales dataset from major auction houses, we benchmark classical hedonic regressions and tree-based methods against modern deep architectur

December 28, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

On the use of case estimate and transactional payment data in neural networks for individual loss reserving

The use of neural networks trained on individual claims data has become increasingly popular in the actuarial reserving literature. We consider how to best input historical payment data in neural network models. Additionally, case estimates are also available in the format of a time series, and we e

December 28, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Squeezed Covariance Matrix Estimation: Analytic Eigenvalue Control

We revisit Gerber’s Informational Quality (IQ) framework, a data-driven approach for constructing correlation matrices from co-movement evidence, and address two obstacles that limit its use in portfolio optimization: guaranteeing positive semidefinite ness (PSD) and controlling spectral conditionin

December 28, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

AutoQuant: An Auditable Expert-System Framework for Execution-Constrained Auto-Tuning in Cryptocurrency Perpetual Futures

Backtests of cryptocurrency perpetual futures are fragile when they ignore microstructure frictions and reuse evaluation windows during parameter search. We study four liquid perpetuals (BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, AVAX/USDT) and quantify how execution delay, funding, fees, and slippage can inflat

December 27, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Index-Tracking Portfolio Construction and Rebalancing under Bayesian Sparse Modelling and Uncertainty Quantification

We study the construction and rebalancing of sparse index-tracking portfolios from an operational research perspective, with explicit emphasis on uncertainty quantification and implementability. The decision variables are portfolio weights constrained to sum to one; the aims are to track a reference

December 26, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Investigating Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines in Regime Detection

This study investigates the efficacy of Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CRBMs) for modeling high-dimensional financial time series and detecting systemic risk regimes. We extend the classical application of static Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) by incorporating autoregressive condit

December 26, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Real-World Finance: Scalable Solutions for Dynamic Portfolio Optimization Problems

We present a scalable, hardware-aware methodology for extending the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to large, realistic Dynamic Portfolio Optimization (DPO) problems. Building on the scaling strategy from our previous work, where we tailored a VQE workflow to both the DPO formulation and the t

December 26, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

When Indemnity Insurance Fails: Parametric Coverage under Binding Budget and Risk Constraints

In high-risk environments, traditional indemnity insurance is often unaffordable or ineffective, despite its well-known optimality under expected utility. We compare excess-of-loss indemnity insurance with parametric insurance within a common mean-variance framework, allowing for fixed costs, hetero

December 26, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Chaos, Ito-Stratonovich dilemma, and topological supersymmetry

It was recently established that the formalism of the generalized transfer operator (GTO) of dynamical systems (DS) theory, applied to stochastic differential equations (SDEs) of arbitrary form, belongs to the family of cohomological topological field theories (TFT) – a class of models at the inters

December 25, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Deep Generative Models for Synthetic Financial Data: Applications to Portfolio and Risk Modeling

Synthetic financial data provides a practical solution to the privacy, accessibility, and reproducibility challenges that often constrain empirical research in quantitative finance. This paper investigates the use of deep generative models, specifically Time-series Generative Adversarial Networks (T

December 25, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Mean-Field Price Formation on Trees with a Network of Relative Performance Concerns

Financial firms and institutional investors are routinely evaluated based on their performance relative to their peers. These relative performance concerns significantly influence risk-taking behavior and market dynamics. While the literature studying Nash equilibrium under such relative performance

December 25, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Synthetic Financial Data Generation for Enhanced Financial Modelling

Data scarcity and confidentiality in finance often impede model development and robust testing. This paper presents a unified multi-criteria evaluation framework for synthetic financial data and applies it to three representative generative paradigms: the statistical ARIMA-GARCH baseline, Variationa

December 25, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space

Discrete-time asset price bubbles with short sales prohibitions under model uncertainty

In this study, we investigate asset price bubbles in a discrete-time, discrete-state market under model uncertainty and short sales prohibitions. Building on a new fundamental theorem of asset pricing and a superhedging duality in this setting, we introduce a notion of bubble based on a novel defini

December 24, 2025 · 2 min · thequant.space