# Tag Info

3

I use the 'implied correlation' defined as $$\rho = \frac{V^2_P-\sum V^2_j}{(\sum V_j)^2-\sum V^2_j}$$ for $V_p$ the VaR (or volatility) of the portfolio, and $V_j$ the VaRs (or volatilities) of the individual components. Essentially it shows what would be the common correlation that I would need to use in order to aggregate the stand-alone risks to the ...

2

Yes, it is normal for a L/S fund to have a lot of cash. When you short securities your account is credited with the proceeds from the sales. So if you short 1 million of stock you end up with 1 million cash and -1 million short stock position. Another way to look at it is: as you mentioned, the weights as a fraction of NAV have to add up to 1.0 by definition ...

2

In 2006 Choueifaty proposed a measure of portfolio diversification, called the Diversification Ratio (DR), which he defined as the ratio of the weighted average of the volatilities of the assets in the portfolio, to the portfolios overall volatility. The DR of a long only portfolio is greater than or equal to one, and equals unity for a ...

2

You can also use the Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index (HCI) as a measure for concentration. In portfolio analysis, you can calculate it as $\frac{1}{N} \leq HCI(x) = \sum_{i=1}^N x_i^2 \leq 1$ where $x$ is a vector of $N$ portfolio asset weights. One can easily see that $HCI(x) = 1$ if 100% is invested in a single asset, and $HCI(x) = 1/N$ if the portfolio is ...

1

Alex C's and Kiwiakos' answers are definitely the most realistic approaches. If you are open to consider also other kinds of risk measures, further alternatives might be thought of. Variance / correlation based approaches interprete "diversification" as how much your assets are heterogeneous from the point of view of deviations from the historical mean. In ...

1

Market-neutral portfolios seek to eliminate market risk, so sum of the weights could be even a zero. That would mean that you bought a lot of some equity, and then borrowed some other equity and sold it. You have cash now, but you also have risks, because you will have to return the borrowed equity in the end, and who knows how much you will have to pay to ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible