No Arabic abstract
The paper predicts an Efficient Market Property for the equity market, where stocks, when denominated in units of the growth optimal portfolio (GP), have zero instantaneous expected returns. Well-diversified equity portfolios are shown to approximate the GP, which explains the well-observed good performance of equally weighted portfolios. The proposed hierarchically weighted index (HWI) is shown to be an even better proxy of the GP. It sets weights equal within industrial and geographical groupings of stocks. When using the HWI as proxy of the GP the Efficient Market Property cannot be easily rejected and appears to be very robust.
We propose a data-driven portfolio selection model that integrates side information, conditional estimation and robustness using the framework of distributionally robust optimization. Conditioning on the observed side information, the portfolio manager solves an allocation problem that minimizes the worst-case conditional risk-return trade-off, subject to all possible perturbations of the covariate-return probability distribution in an optimal transport ambiguity set. Despite the non-linearity of the objective function in the probability measure, we show that the distributionally robust portfolio allocation with side information problem can be reformulated as a finite-dimensional optimization problem. If portfolio decisions are made based on either the mean-variance or the mean-Conditional Value-at-Risk criterion, the resulting reformulation can be further simplified to second-order or semi-definite cone programs. Empirical studies in the US and Chinese equity markets demonstrate the advantage of our integrative framework against other benchmarks.
In this study, we have investigated empirically the effects of market properties on the degree of diversification of investment weights among stocks in a portfolio. The weights of stocks within a portfolio were determined on the basis of Markowitzs portfolio theory. We identified that there was a negative relationship between the influence of market properties and the degree of diversification of the weights among stocks in a portfolio. Furthermore, we noted that the random matrix theory method could control the properties of correlation matrix between stocks; this may be useful in improving portfolio management for practical application.
The emergence of robust optimization has been driven primarily by the necessity to address the demerits of the Markowitz model. There has been a noteworthy debate regarding consideration of robust approaches as superior or at par with the Markowitz model, in terms of portfolio performance. In order to address this skepticism, we perform empirical analysis of three robust optimization models, namely the ones based on box, ellipsoidal and separable uncertainty sets. We conclude that robust approaches can be considered as a viable alternative to the Markowitz model, not only in simulated data but also in a real market setup, involving the Indian indices of S&P BSE 30 and S&P BSE 100. Finally, we offer qualitative and quantitative justification regarding the practical usefulness of robust optimization approaches from the point of view of number of stocks, sample size and types of data.
Optimal portfolio selection problems are determined by the (unknown) parameters of the data generating process. If an investor want to realise the position suggested by the optimal portfolios he/she needs to estimate the unknown parameters and to account the parameter uncertainty into the decision process. Most often, the parameters of interest are the population mean vector and the population covariance matrix of the asset return distribution. In this paper we characterise the exact sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics by deriving their sampling distribution which is present in terms of a stochastic representation. This approach possesses several advantages, like (i) it determines the sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights by expressions which could be used to draw samples from this distribution efficiently; (ii) the application of the derived stochastic representation provides an easy way to obtain the asymptotic approximation of the sampling distribution. The later property is used to show that the high-dimensional asymptotic distribution of optimal portfolio weights is a multivariate normal and to determine its parameters. Moreover, a consistent estimator of optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics is derived under the high-dimensional settings. Via an extensive simulation study, we investigate the finite-sample performance of the derived asymptotic approximation and study its robustness to the violation of the model assumptions used in the derivation of the theoretical results.
Online portfolio selection research has so far focused mainly on minimizing regret defined in terms of wealth growth. Practical financial decision making, however, is deeply concerned with both wealth and risk. We consider online learning of portfolios of stocks whose prices are governed by arbitrary (unknown) stationary and ergodic processes, where the goal is to maximize wealth while keeping the conditional value at risk (CVaR) below a desired threshold. We characterize the asymptomatically optimal risk-adjusted performance and present an investment strategy whose portfolios are guaranteed to achieve the asymptotic optimal solution while fulfilling the desired risk constraint. We also numerically demonstrate and validate the viability of our method on standard datasets.