Published in The Journal of Alternative Investments, Spring 2014, Vol. 16, No. 4: pp. 71-87.

The market for structured products has grown dramatically in the past decade. Their diversity and complexity has led to the development of many different valuation approaches, and which approach to use to value a given product is not always clear. In this paper we demonstrate and discuss four approaches to valuing structured products: simulation of the linked financial instrument’s future values, numerical integration, decomposition, and partial differential equation approaches. As an example, we use all four approaches to value a common type of structured product and discuss the virtues and pitfalls of each. These approaches have been practically applied to value 20,000 structured products in our database.

The financial interests of a trust’s beneficiaries are often diametrically opposed and conflict among trust beneficiaries is common. Although applicable law requires that trustees adhere to lofty standards of ‘good faith’ and ‘fair dealing’ they must make tangible, specific decisions, and sometimes under circumstances in which the settlor’s expectations regarding investments and distributions as set forth in the trust document are unclear. Traditional methods for valuing partial interests in trusts offer insufficient guidance to courts in assessing the prudent investor standard, as they often disregard many of the important factors which go into investment decisions–notably, the allocations to different asset classes.

In this paper, we develop a valuation methodology based on Monte Carlo Simulation techniques which allows for economically feasible ex ante valuation of partial interests in trusts. The MCS technique is widely used in modern finance and economics, and is especially useful for valuing partial interests because it can incorporate mortality risk, portfolio asset allocation, varying distributions and the discretionary sale of the trust’s assets to fund distributions. We explain how the MCS method can incorporate a variety of assumptions about the income beneficiary’s mortality and the trustee’s decisions, and show how these factors affect the valuation of partial interests.

Published in the Journal of Investing, Winter 2010, Vol. 19, No. 4: pp. 58-65.

The SLCG study explains that the Average Credit Quality statistic as typically calculated by the mutual fund companies and by Morningstar significantly overstates bond mutual funds’ true credit quality. This statistic is based on Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s assessment of the credit risk of the individual bonds in the portfolio and is reported to mutual fund investors using the familiar letter scale for rating the credit risk of bonds.

The study concludes that, for instance, funds that have the credit risk of a portfolio of BBB-rated bonds often report an Average Credit Quality of A or even AA and that given how this statistic is calculated, portfolio managers can easily manipulate their holdings to significantly increase their credit risk and thereby their yield without increasing their reported credit risk at all. Since bond fund managers compete for investors based on yield and risk, the authors find that fund managers who report Average Credit Quality have the ability and the incentive to increase but underreport the credit risk in their bond mutual fund portfolios.