Hedging Against the Interest-rate Risk by Measuring the Yield-curve Movement

By adopting the polynomial interpolation method, we propose an approach to hedge against the interest-rate risk of the default-free bonds by measuring the nonparallel movement of the yield-curve, such as the translation, the rotation and the twist. The empirical analysis shows that our hedging strategies are comparable to traditional duration-convexity strategy, or even better when we have more suitable hedging instruments on hand. The article shows that this strategy is flexible and robust to cope with the interest-rate risk and can help fine-tune a position as time changes.Comment: 12 pages, 2 tables, 5 figure

Dimensionality Reduction for Stationary Time Series via Stochastic Nonconvex Optimization

Stochastic optimization naturally arises in machine learning. Efficient algorithms with provable guarantees, however, are still largely missing, when the objective function is nonconvex and the data points are dependent. This paper studies this fundamental challenge through a streaming PCA problem for stationary time series data. Specifically, our goal is to estimate the principle component of time series data with respect to the covariance matrix of the stationary distribution. Computationally, we propose a variant of Oja's algorithm combined with downsampling to control the bias of the stochastic gradient caused by the data dependency. Theoretically, we quantify the uncertainty of our proposed stochastic algorithm based on diffusion approximations. This allows us to prove the asymptotic rate of convergence and further implies near optimal asymptotic sample complexity. Numerical experiments are provided to support our analysis