Title: On the Relation between Forecast Precision and Trading Profitability of Financial Analysts
Speaker: Prof. Alex Weissensteiner
Affiliation: DTU Management Engineering
Location: Room 217 Huxley Building
Time: 5:00pm

Abstract. We analyze the relation between earning forecast accuracy and expected profitability of financial analysts. Modeling forecast errors with a multivariate Gaussian distribution, a complete characterization of the payoff of each analyst is provided. In particular, closed-form expressions for the probability density function, for the expectation, and, more generally, for moments of all orders are obtained. Our analysis shows that the relationship between forecast precision and trading profitability need not to be monotonic, and that, for any analyst, the impact on his expected payoff of the correlation between his forecasts and those of the other market participants depends on the accuracy of his signals. Furthermore, our model accommodates a unique full-communication equilibrium in the sense of Radner (1979).

About the speaker. Alex finished his PhD in 2003 and received his “Habilitation” from the Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck (Austria) in 2010, where he worked as Assistant Professor. From 2010-2013 he worked atthe Free University of Bozen-Bolzano(Italy), School of Economics and Management.Hisfields of research are in the intersection of finance, optimization and mathematical modeling. Themain topics covered by his scientific publications are: asset allocation, asset-liability management, stochastic (linear-) programming(SLP), and neural networks. Since February 2013 he is working as Professor for Financial Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).