Abstract:
A topic of interest in the finance world is measuring systematic risk.
Accurately measuring the systematic risk component - or Beta - of an asset or
portfolio is important in many financial applications. In this work, we consider
the effciency of a range of Beta estimation methods commonly used in practice
from a reference-day risk perspective. We show that, when using the industry
standard data sample of fi ve years of monthly returns, the choice of reference-
day used to calculate underlying returns has a signifi cant impact on all of the
Beta estimation methods considered. Driven by this finding, we propose and test an alternative non-parametric bootstrap approach for calculating Beta
estimates which is unaffected by reference-day risk. Our primary goal is to
determine a point-estimate of Beta, independent of reference-day. Keywords:
reference-day risk, bootstrap, systematic risk, Beta.
