# Tag Info

16

The minimum variance solution loads up on securities that have low variances and co-variances. Theoretically you are correct that this should have a low expected return profile. However, it turns out - in contradiction to modern portfolio theory - that securities that have low-volatility or low-beta experience higher returns than high-volatility or ...

14

Yes, the weights of the first eigenvector of a covariance matrix represent the market factor and also the largest source of systematic risk (variation of returns). Why PCA? Well, PCA simply identifies the eigenvector that maximally explains the variance of the system. It turns out that this is the "market factor" - i.e. the tendency of securities to rise ...

13

Statistically you would apply Bessel's correction to address the bias you point out. However, that misses the point that the variance-covariance matrix is non-stationary, suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and that the noisy mean return estimates have significantly more impact than a biased covariance matrix on portfolio weights. The best ways to ...

10

Short of having a 'reasonable' predictive model for expected returns and the covariance matrix, there are a couple lines of attack. Shrinkage estimators (via Bayesian inference or Stein-class of estimators) Robust portfolio optimization Michaud's Resampled Efficient Frontier Imposing norm constraints on portfolio weights Naively, shrinkage methods ...

8

The following papers may help. A New Look at Minimum Variance Investing by Bernd Scherer Minimum Variance Portfolio Composition by Clarke, De Silva & Thorley Under a multifactor risk-based model, if the global minimum variance portfolio dominates the market portfolio, the implication is that the market portfolio is not multifactor efficient and that ...

8

Both answers from Shane and Vishal Belsare make sense and detail different models. In my experience, I have never been satisfied by a unique model since the majority of papers out there can be split in two categories: Those that predict the mean component of the problem. Those that predict the variance component of the problem. The ideal (to read ...

7

Yes. Check out the Lower Partial Moments literature. In my view the best introduction to this is Narwrocki - A Brief History of Downside Risk Measures. Uryasev established equivalence between CVaR approach and low partial moments. If Markowitz had the tools at the time time, LPM utility functions would be the introductory optimization model as opposed to ...

6

If you look in the portfolio management sections of the CFA (chartered financial analyst) curriculum, you'll find a listing of commonly used portfolio management techniques. It is by no means exhaustive, but the content in the CFA curriculum comes directly from industry professionals, so it is reasonable current and applicable. CFA Candidate Body of ...

6

You raise a very important point, which unfortunately doesn't have a simple answer. Black-Litterman addresses the allocation problem by allowing you to provide a prior within a bayesian framework. It doesn't really tell you how to produce the prior itself. But more importantly, it doesn't address the fundamental problem: it's difficult to accurately ...

6

Unlike the tangency portfolio on the efficient frontier (which represents the most efficient portfolio in terms of max expected sharp ratio), min var portfolios have no ex ante theory that suggests it should outperform a cap weighted market portfolio. The same can be said about other risk-weighted portfolio construction schemes, including equal risk ...

5

Bernd Scherer has done exactly this test in his text "Portfolio Construction and Risk Budgeting 4th Edition". There is an SSRN paper by Scherer called "Resampled Efficiency and Portfolio Choice (2004)" you can take a look at as well. I would suggest you skip re-sampling (especially if you have a long-only portfolio) and take a look at Meucci's Robot ...

5

The blog post http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2011/10/03/predictability-of-kurtosis-and-skewness-in-sp-constituents/ suggests that there is some predictability in kurtosis, but it isn't clear (to me at least) that there is enough predictabiilty to be useful. If there is a place for higher moments, my guess is that it is in asset allocation problems where ...

5

I'm just providing a global answer to the question, as I think it can be interesting for some beginners in quant finance. The properties given by TheBridge: Normalize $\rho (\emptyset)=0$ This means you have no risk in taking no position. Sub-addiitivity $\rho(A_1+A_2) \leq \rho(A_1)+\rho(A_2)$ Having a position in two different can only decrease the ...

5

There are many portfolio optimization paradigms that include a preference for skewness. These are generally alternatives meant to replace the modern portfolio management mean-variance framework developed by Markowitz. Skewness (or, more generally, higher moments) are only relevant in portfolio optimization if (a) assets are not normally distributed, and ...

5

The minimum variance optimization framework does not guarantee positive return whatsoever. As a matter of fact what you are trying to do is something close to the following: $$\underset{w}{\arg \min} \quad w' Q w \quad \text{s.t} \quad Aw \leq b,\quad \sum_i w_i=1$$ The fact that you get positive return is a nice result that you get from your backtest ...

5

Tools from the field of stochastic optimization are best suited for these problems. In particular, attached is a paper on non-parametric density estimation for stochastic optimization that describes an algorithm if state variables can be associated with draws from the predictive distribution. Here's another approach by Kuhn. These are all one-period ...

4

There's a huge literature on this topic going back at least 30 years, and I am unfortunately not familiar enough with this literature to give you a great answer to your specific question. However, I will in this answer at least try to point you in some useful directions according to what I've found thus far. Kurtosis, by the way, seems like it is not ...

4

the question is very broad, Here is the brief summary of the role of all moments in portfolio optimization: expected value- the 1st moment represents the reward. All the even higher moments represent the likelihood of extreme values. Larger values for these moments indicate greater uncertainty. The odd moments represent measures of asymmetry. Skewness ...

4

Adding a bit to the references mentioned by Quant Guy - apart from the aforementioned paper by Keating and Shadwick, Kazemi et al. introduce an alternative formulation of the Omega ratio (Sharpe-Omega) similar to the Sharpe ratio. As noted by Patrick Burns, higher moments could have some use when instruments other than equity are involved (hedge fund ...

4

From a theoretical point of view (you mentioned beta, so assume we're in a CAPM world), you should hold the market portfolio (let's assume S&P500 index) and be long (or short) the risk-free asset to decrease (or increase) your return and risk. That is, if you'd like higher returns than the S&P500 offers and are willing to accept the risk, trade the ...

4

Most portfolio managers look at the Sharpe ratio, or occasionally the Treynor ratio. In general, you want to maximize one of the these metrics, though there could be other issues that you haven't currently considered, like turnover or transaction costs associated with obtaining the portfolio.

4

Yes, this is what the idea behind Omega as a portfolio optimization objective is all about. Keating and Shadwick (2002a, 2002b) first introduced this notion. An introduction by Keating is here. In fact, the Performance Analytics package in R includes a function to calculate Omega. For your second question, one can compute the moments of higher orders ...

3

Is the covariance of the raw return forecasts a good forecaster of the covariance of market returns? As you suggest, the covariance of the raw return forecasts is a lousy forecast of the covariance of market returns. Grinold & Kahn explain why quite eloquently in Active Portfolio Management, 2nd edition (pg. 275). It might be tempting to augment the ...

3

Any explanations? Yes. Within each asset category we find that stocks may be: Unattractively underperforming the category norm Attractive as they meet the expected norm Unsustainable as their returns exceed the category norm and may suffer mean reversion By focusing on low variance, we exclude type (3) stocks that damage portfolio performance through ...

3

Assuming you're talking about optimizing a portfolio that has options included in its investment universe. Skewness isn't directly modeled in the optimization, although many formulations involve using implied vol as the currency numeraire. (i.e. modeling the components of skewness, instead of skewness itself) The main impact on the optimization though is ...

3

Strictly speaking the risk aversion coefficient depends on the form of investor preferences. Your "multi-objective evolutionary algorithm" may or may not be easy to place in this format. However, it becomes easy if you think about the risk aversion coefficient in mean/variance space if you were a mean-variance variance investor. In this case you would have ...

3

This pdf says on page two that the paper was never published. I don't know the reason but you could try to mail the authors of the papers were the article is mentioned. Since it was never published it might be less encumbered by copyright than usual.

2

Morningstar recently came out with a piece entitled The Real World is Not Normal: Introducing the new frontier: an alternative to the mean-variance optimizer. It essentially summarizes their views on Mean-CVaR optimization, based on Xiong and Idzorek (2011). This research piece also contains their estimates for the first four moments (but does not list ...

2

Such an article, if written in English, would get laughed at so hard by the blogosphere the authors would be shamed into doing a bit more research on Wikipedia next time before claiming a fully automated AI system is "the first of its kind." This guy's main competitive advantage is in pitching to non-English speaking Danes who don't have a clue what's ...

2

There is a great deal of misinformation and out-of-date information on this site. Many of the references in this discussion and elsewhere have serious research flaws. The Michaud efficient frontier was invented and patented by Robert Michaud and Richard Michaud, U.S. patent # 6,003,018. The alternatives discussed here are not patented nor in many cases ...

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