# Tag Info

6

This is indeed a subtle point. What is generally meant with this statement is that correlation is going up in bear markets, so it is not so much the "turmoil" part (i.e. volatility per se) but the "trend" (i.e. negative in this case) part. Putting it another way is that when you control for volatility not the correlation but the covariance (which is the part ...

6

As a practitioner, I have worked on the following Maximize Yield/OAS for a Fixed Income Portfolio keeping the Rates Duration (Key Rate Durations) and Spread duration in a constrained range . There are other constraints such as No short selling Max amount you can buy is X% of Max outstanding amount in market Maximum exposure to a perticular country , ...

5

This optimization is trivial $$w^{T,J}_i = \begin{cases} 1 \quad \text{if } i=\arg \max_i R^{T,J}(S_i) \\0 \quad \text{otherwise} \end{cases}$$ That is to say, when you optimize only one weight will be nonzero. That's because these ratios incorporate no notion of distributional width, and therefore do not reward diversification. With no concentration ...

5

The weak EMH states that it is impossible to earn an excess return given publicly known information such as past prices. Clearly, different securities have different expected returns. For example: the bond and the stock of one company or a security that generates twice the return of another one. This difference in expected return is explained by a ...

5

To clarify notation, you have an universe of $n=2000 \space$ stocks and two portfolio vectors $\mathbf{a},\mathbf{b}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with $\left\|\mathbf{a}\right\|_{1}=\left\|\mathbf{b}\right\|_{1}=1$. Further, you have Estimators for the true Variance $\operatorname{Var}\left[\mathbf{a}\right]$ resp. $\operatorname{Var}\left[\mathbf{b}\right]$ and the ...

5

Accurately stated: Diversification helps during turmoil, but helps less as what would be expected by using $w^T \Omega w$ as the portfolio variance where the off-diagonal covariances are estimated during tranquil periods. This is because correlations and covariances change during turmoil, typically increasing. This reduces the benefit of diversification ...

4

With respect to issue one, it can be simpler to consider the case where the constraint on the expected return is an equality. In that case, the first problem can be transformed to Minimize with respect to $\left\{ x,\lambda_{1},\lambda_{2}\right\}$: $x'\Sigma x + \lambda_{1} (\mu'x - r) + \lambda_{2} (1'x - 1)$ by the technique of Lagrangian multipliers, ...

4

The initial investment is the capital in the account used to support the portfolio, not the cost of the assets in the portfolio. For example, when you sell a stock or bond short, your account doesn't actually accrue any cash. Instead you start receiving a regular cash flow. There isn't necessarily a difference between these quantities in a long-only ...

4

You can obtain the covariance between 2 portfolios by multiplying the row vector, containing the weights of portfolio A with the variance-covariance matrix of the assets and then multiplying with the column vector, containing the weights of assets in portfolio B. Equally you can set up a new portfolio A+B by creating a new column vector that contains the ...

4

Lots of wealth management firms still use MPT; in my experience regulators like it because they understand it. If asset returns are normally distributed, the standard deviation of the portfolio is a coherent risk measure (this can be seen by noting that the normal distribution's CVaR, which is a coherent risk measure, can be written as $$\mu+c \sigma$$ ...

4

There are plenty of books on portfolio issues built according to formula "some theory + some R code (or Matlab, or S - which is very similar to R)". See for example Pfaff B. Financial Risk Modelling and Portfolio Optimization with R.// 2013. Best M.J. Portfolio Optimization. Chapman & Hall, 2010. Würtz D. et al. Portfolio Optimization with ...

4

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) states that you cannot beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis by looking at past prices. You can certainly earn higher returns than the market if you take on more risk (by leveraging, for example). Modern Portfolio Theory allows you to construct portfolios that are efficient. According to this theory, you still cannot ...

3

Initial capital is not a real constraint in theoretical analysis, but might be a practical constraint in reality. The objective function you gave defines the efficient frontier corresponding to a given risk tolerance $q \in [0, \infty]$: $$\min\{w^T\Sigma w-qR^Tw\}$$ This criterion is among the other popular optimization criteria, such as minimum variance, ...

3

There are many papers on this subject (try googling portfolio optimization skewness kurtosis) that can describe the assumptions of including skewness and kurtosis in a utility function (if that's what you're interested in). I would highlight two main points. Mean-variance optimization does not make an assumption of normality. Assume returns are ...

2

Check out following link. In page 23 you'll find the derivation. http://faculty.washington.edu/ezivot/econ424/portfolioTheoryMatrix.pdf

2

The Lyxor white paper Regularization of Portfolio Allocation contains a lot on this topic. The head of quant research there, Thierry Roncalli, also held a talk about this recently.

2

The concrete (general) answer to part (ii) of my question seems to be contained in Equation 8 of the following link: http://www.columbia.edu/~ks20/FE-Notes/4700-07-Notes-portfolio-I.pdf In particular, interpreting $\sigma$ as volatility, take for example $E_A=0.10,\sigma_A=0.15,E_B=0.25,\sigma_B=0.40$ and $\rho =−0.2$. I get that about 83 percent of the ...

2

Pretty good explanation is in Schweser CFA Study Notes for CFA level III. Books 3 and 5, at least from 2009, if I remember right. See also Tsay R.S. Analysis of Financial Time Series (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics). // 2010. - good example with implementation in R.

2

Let there be n stocks, 2 portfolio a and b. c is a combined portfolio of portfolio a and portfolio b. $\Sigma$ is variance-covariance matrix of the n assets. Weight vectors for portfolios a and b are $$w_{pa},w_{pb}\in\mathbb{R}^{n} ,$$ $$\left\|w_{pa}\right\|_{1}=\left\|w_{pb}\right\|_{1}=1$$ then $$Var(a)= w_{pa}' \Sigma w_{pa}$$ $$Var(b)= w_{pb}' ... 2 EMH says that one can not earn excess return using some information. This is known as joint-hypothesis problem: to test for market efficiency one have to determine first what is "normal" market return, i.e. what type of information is normally priced by the market. Usually to test for EMH they use CAPM or 3-factor Fama-French model (which is a kind of ... 2 I assume you're talking about this formula:$$U(w) = w'\mu - \frac{1}{2} \lambda w' \Sigma w = w'\mu - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \sigma_\omega^2 where $\sigma_\omega^2$ denotes the portfolio variance for a portfolio with weights $\omega$. Dividing by two is purely done for convenience, optimizing this formula requires taking the derivative with respect to ...

2

I am engineer studying Finance, therefore Im not an expert in Math/Stat, but not noob. I disagree with the previous answer. In fact, I know portfolio managers and hedge fund assesors that usses MPT. It must be said that you need to know what that represents, and also not only focus your investment in MPT, but consider other methods. Like in every other ...

2

Sure a lot of traditional (mutual) buy side funds use MPT. They also mostly subscribe to the efficient market hypotheses. And they also do not hide the fact that they have no interest to lobby many retirement investment and savings schemes to allow for long/short investments but hold on to long-only. And finally, most of them underperform simple benchmark ...

2

Well, you are asking something very subjective. In addition it should be mentioned that S&P500 are the companies with higher capitalization of S&P1500. Therefore a huge weight of S&P1500 is set by S&P500. In fact, as it can be seen in 2008 both went down a 37%, in the other hand S&P500 has 80% of the total of the US equity Market. After ...

2

You are asking two different questions: what would be the model result, and what would be the actual performance of an actual portfolio. The optimal model results with the S&P 1500 will be at least as good as the model results with the S&P 500. The S&P is a proper subset of the S&P 1500, so you can get the results of the S&P 500 model by ...

2

The coefficients assuming they are statistically significant can be interpreted whether or not the underlying portfolio is efficient. The CAPM or FF4 simply tries to decompose a portfolio into a series of linear exposures + an intercept (alpha) which can be viewed as constant added value. In mathematical terms the regression is explaining how much of ...

2

Use PortfolioAnalytics See my previous response here: http://quant.stackexchange.com/a/16002/2154 , you will find links to the documentation there. You can use the constraint function to add a factor exposure constraint of 0. use add.constraint(your_portfolio_name,type='factor_exposure',B = your_vector_of_betas,lower=0,upper=0)

2

An introductory presentation by Michael Brandt from a seminar of Inquire Europe is Bayesian Portfolio Construction. His review Portfolio Choice Problems has a section on decision theory which could also be useful to you. Another good choice is Attilio Meucci's Risk and Asset Allocation book which contains a whole chapter (ch 9) on Bayesian techniques in ...

1

MPT should be called Medieval Portfolio Theory, it is a theory from 50 years ago with huge theoretical flaws (mean-variance utility, use of Pearson's correlation that is not coherent, based on historical data). Come on, it is an error maximizer. The least one could do is Michoud resampling, but it is patented. Or a bayesian Black-Litterman would be more ...

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