# Tag Info

13

Quant Guy's list is really impressive! However, I am not sure they will readily solve your specific problem? I think there is one missing piece. Please note that imputing missing data is a very broad topic. There are many recipes to impute missings but that's for their specific 'assumptions' and purposes. They do not necessarily intend to well address your ...

13

There is some research that directly bears upon the issue of estimating covariance in the presence of unequal return histories and regime change. Wharton professor Robert Stambaugh (of liquidity premia fame) wrote a paper in '97 called "Analyzing Investments Whose Histories Differ in Length". Prior to the paper, most academics and practitioners would use ...

8

This is correct: "The general idea of cleansing a correlation matrix via random matrix theory is to compare its eigenvalues to that of a random one to see which parts of it are beyond normal randomness." This is not correct: "These are then filtered out and one is left with the non-random parts." The term "filtering", although used extensively in the ...

8

There are two functions for estimating variance matrices with missing values (and aimed at finance, by the way) in the R package BurStFin. Available via: install.packages('BurStFin', repos="http://www.burns-stat.com/R") but not yet for 2.14.x. You can of course get a correlation matrix from the variance matrix. One function estimates a statistical ...

8

For years, I performed this brute-force search daily on my universe of tradable stocks and futures. It is a waste of time. If your computer discovers that hog futures and MSFT are cointegrated, for example, do you really care? I would never trade that pair. There is no economic connection between hogs and Microsoft, so I must assume that the reported, small ...

7

If $X \sim N(\mu, V)$ is multivariate gaussian, you can write $X = \mu + C Y$ where $Y \sim N(0,1)$ is a standard Gaussian and $C$ is the lower-triangular Choleski matrix of $V$. You can then express $v = \sum_{i=1}^n (X_i - S/n)^2$, where $S = \sum_{i=1}^n X_i$, in terms of $Y$ and $C$. (I do not reproduce the computations: they are straightforward.) ...

7

Yes, you need Cholesky factorization. You can find the general idea here: http://www.goddardconsulting.ca/option-pricing-monte-carlo-basket.html Plus the implementation in MATLAB here: http://www.goddardconsulting.ca/matlab-monte-carlo-assetpaths-corr.html The code in general should be easily translatable. The only difficulty is the Cholesky factorization ...

6

Theoretically, the answer to the question is yes, a correlation matrix for potential pairs trades can be computed in $O\left((n^2t)^{(\omega+\epsilon)/3}\right)$ time, for any $\epsilon > 0$, where $\omega < 2.38$ is the so-called exponent of matrix multiplication. However, these algorithms have a reputation for having a very large constant factor ...

3

How about adapting Ledoit-Wolf shrinkage to average correlation? You calculate the ratio of average correlations in two regimes to get a sense of the magnitude of regime shift. Use this ratio to adjust the correlations of short-lived stock with others. The method is simple and result will definitely make sense to you.

3

For the stationary multivariate normal case, the expected returns vector does not matter. This is because the cross-sectional mean is subtracted out before calculating the standard deviation. The cross-sectional mean can be more conveniently thought of as like the return on an equally weighted portfolio. Similarly, I would argue that the expected ...

2

I am not an expert in this field, but it would be best to consider a full multivariate GARCH model. This paper by Engle and Sheppard should be a good start. I think the constant correlation matrix approach is covered to a certain extent too. I hope this helps.

2

I had to answer because of your name, and becaue I deal with portfolio optimization often. In my world of equities correlation does matter a lot. If one follows the thoughts e.g. here then it matters most. I deal with minimum-variance construction (no expected return, of course some constraints on the weights) and there I often see positions that come ...

2

See "Some hypothesis tests for the covariance matrix when the dimension is large compared to the sample size" by Ledoit and Wolf. http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aos/1031689018

1

You will probably be interested in the following papers: Ang & Chen: Asymmetric Correlations of Equity Portfolios Longin & Solnik: Extreme Correlation of International Equity Markets Hong et al: Asymmetric Correlation of Stock Returns: Statistical Tests and Economic Evaluation The last paper goes further into exploring the implications of ...

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