Multistage Stochastic Programming Model for the Portfolio Problem of a Property-Liability Insurance Company

The current portfolio model for property-liability insurance company is only single period that can not meet the practical demands of portfolio management, and the purpose of this paper is to develop a multiperiod model for its portfolio problem. The model is a multistage stochastic programming which considers transaction costs, cash flow between time periods, and the matching of asset and liability; it does not depend on the assumption for normality of return distribution. Additionally, an investment constraint is added. The numerical example manifests that the multiperiod model can more effectively assist the property-liability insurer to determine the optimal composition of insurance and investment portfolio and outperforms the single period one.

Foreign exchange trading and management with the stochastic dual dynamic programming method

We present a novel tool for generating speculative and hedging foreign exchange(FX)trading policies.Our solution provides a schedule that determines trades in each rebalancing period based on future currency prices,net foreign account positions,and incoming(outgoing)flows from business operations.To obtain such policies,we construct a multistage stochastic programming(MSP)model and solve it using the stochastic dual dynamic programming(SDDP)numerical method,which specializes in solving high-dimensional MSP models.We construct our methodology within an open-source SDDP package,avoiding implementing the method from scratch.To measure the performance of our policies,we model FX prices as a mean-reverting stochastic process with random events that incorporate stochastic trends.We calibrate this price model on seven currency pairs,demonstrating that our trading policies not only outperform the benchmarks for each currency,but may also be close to ex-post optimal solutions.We also show how the tool can be used to generate more or less conservative strategies by adjusting the risk tolerance,and how it can be used in a vari-ety of contexts and time scales,ranging from intraday speculative trading to monthly hedging for business operations.Finally,we examine the impact of increasing trade policy uncertainty(TPU)levels on our findings.Our findings show that the volatility of currencies from emerging economies rises in comparison to currencies from devel-oped markets.We discover that an increase in the TPU level has no effect on the aver-age profit obtained by our method.However,the risk exposure of the policies increases(decreases)for the group of currencies from emerging(developed)markets.