In its modern sense, financial engineering is the design (or engineering) of contracts and portfolios of contracts that result in predetermined cash flows contingent to different events. Broadly speaking, financial engineering is used to manage investments and risk. The objective is the transfer of risk from one entity to another via appropriate contracts. Though the [...]
Constructing an efficient portfolio based on the expected return for a portfolio (which depends on the expected return of all the asset returns in the portfolio) and the variance of the portfolio’s return (which depends on the variance of the return of all of the assets in the portfolio and the covariance of returns between [...]
To construct an efficient portfolio, the investor must be able to quantify risk and provide the necessary inputs. As will be explained in the next series of posts, there are three key inputs that are needed: future expected return (or simply expected return), variance of asset returns, and correlation (or covariance) of asset returns.
There are [...]