Utility-Weighted Forecasting and Calibration for Risk-Adjusted Decisions under Trading Frictions

Craig S Wright

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Forecasting accuracy is routinely optimised in financial prediction tasks even though investment and risk-management decisions are executed under transaction costs, market impact, capacity limits, and binding risk constraints. This paper treats forecasting as an econometric input to a constrained decision problem. A predictive distribution induces a decision rule through a utility objective combined with an explicit friction operator consisting of both a cost functional and a feasible-set constraint system. The econometric target becomes minimisation of expected decision loss net of costs rather than minimisation of prediction error. The paper develops a utility-weighted calibration criterion aligned to the decision loss and establishes sufficient conditions under which calibrated predictive distributions weakly dominate uncalibrated alternatives. An empirical study using a pre-committed nested walk-forward protocol on liquid equity index futures confirms the theory: the proposed utility-weighted calibration reduces realised decision loss by over 30\% relative to an uncalibrated baseline ($t$-stat -30.31) for loss differential and improves the Sharpe ratio from -3.62 to -2.29 during a drawdown regime. The mechanism is identified as a structural reduction in the frequency of binding constraints (from 16.0\% to 5.1\%), preventing the "corner solution" failures that characterize overconfident forecasts in high-friction environments.

Date: 2026-01
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