29 votes
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Why is Markowitz portfolio optimisation so popular considering it is worse than an equal weighted portfolio?

Markowitz's concepts attracted a great deal of interest from theorists (and still do), but never had much application in practice. The results from practical application were always disappointing (...
nbbo2's user avatar
  • 10.9k
17 votes

Current industry standard for (active/passive) portfolio optimizations

I am a professor of finance who has spent his life working in the capital markets in operations, sales, compliance, and research. I would love to tell you about the existence of industry standards, ...
Dave Harris's user avatar
  • 4,359
13 votes
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cvxpy portfolio optimization with risk budgeting

The underlying problem: your ACTR constraints aren't convex The $i$th constraint on your risk contribution can be written: $$ w_i \sum_j \sigma_{ij} w_j \leq c_i s$$ And this isn't a convex ...
Matthew Gunn's user avatar
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13 votes
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Random Portfolios vs Efficient Frontier

You seem to have two distinct problems: How to generate random portfolios How optimal portfolios are structured Ad 1) A straightforward way to simulate the weights of random portfolios is to use ...
g g's user avatar
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12 votes

Why is Markowitz portfolio optimisation so popular considering it is worse than an equal weighted portfolio?

There has been a split in the community ever since Mandelbrot published his paper "On the Variation of Certain Speculative Prices." See: Mandelbrot, B. (1963). The variation of certain speculative ...
Dave Harris's user avatar
  • 4,359
12 votes

Maximum Sharpe portfolio (no short selling restrictions)

Let $R$ be a random vector of risky returns and let $r_f$ denote the risk free rate. Let vector of expected returns $\boldsymbol{\mu} = \operatorname{E}[R]$ and covariance matrix $\Sigma = \...
Matthew Gunn's user avatar
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11 votes
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Maximum Sharpe portfolio (no short selling restrictions)

There are two cases, where short sales are allowed: With riskless lending and borrowing and without. As mentioned in the comments, you just have to solve a linear system. With riskless lending and ...
skoestlmeier's user avatar
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11 votes

Markowitz Eigenvalues & PCA

The main problem stems from the case opposite of the one that you are focusing on: The inversion of the covariance matrix leads to a situation where the smallest eigenvalues of the covariance matrix (...
Hans-Peter Schrei's user avatar
10 votes

Hedging Covid-19 and other low probability high loss risks

There's no easy answer to your question, as noob2 pointed out. You can look online for info from Universa. That fund does exactly what you are asking: https://www.universa.net/riskmitigation.html ...
RWP - Down by the Bay's user avatar
9 votes

Why is Markowitz portfolio optimisation so popular considering it is worse than an equal weighted portfolio?

It is more complicated than that: It is not the optimization per se that leads to inferior results but the data you use. Kritzman et al. makes a strong case in defense of optimization vs. 1/N in this ...
vonjd's user avatar
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9 votes

Maximum Sharpe portfolio (no short selling restrictions)

To complement @skoestimeier's answer on the shortselling-allowed case, I provide a vectorised version. Using the original notation in my post (you may change $r$ to something like $r-r_f$, but this ...
Vim's user avatar
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9 votes
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Is there a way using matrix algebra to add portfolios to a covariance matrix of assets?

If your two assets are denoted by random variables $X_1$, $X_2$, with 2x2 covariance matrix $\mathbf{Q}$ and the portfolios: $$ Z_1 = w_{11} X_1 + w_{12} X_2 $$ $$ Z_2 = w_{21} X_1 + w_{22} X_2 $$ ...
Attack68's user avatar
  • 9,215
9 votes
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Why techniques for portfolio optimization do not take into account the non-fractionability of stock prices?

There are a few related reasons: The optimization becomes a lot harder when only discrete values are considered. Mean variance has a closed form solution for the continuous case but the case with ...
Bob Jansen's user avatar
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8 votes
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Replicate a Portfolio with Given Payoff

Consider the case where we are interested in decomposing a continuous and piece-wise linear European payoff function $V \left( S_T \right)$ over $n$ intervals with $n + 1$ node points $S_i$ for $i = 0,...
LocalVolatility's user avatar
8 votes
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Which portfolio is more "diversified": the $\frac{1}{N}$, the MDP or the max decorrelation?

First of all, I am not sure what you mean by the ratio in your second point. However, I will try to give you a partial answer at least. There is a very comprehensive overview of these by EDHEC, page 4....
vanguard2k's user avatar
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8 votes

Closed-form analytical solution for the variance of the minimum-variance portfolio?

A few more steps beyond your last equation gives the answer. With $C = \mathbf{1}^T\mathbf{\Sigma}^{-1}\mathbf{1}$, we have $$\sigma_P^2 = [C^{-1} \mathbf{\Sigma}^{-1}\mathbf{1}]^T \mathbf{\Sigma} [C^{...
RRL's user avatar
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8 votes
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How can I measure returns such that the average is useful?

Take the log return between days.
Newquant's user avatar
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7 votes
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Is it possible to deal with non-normal distribution in Black-Litterman model?

Well there are two main things to consider here. Many implementation of Black-Litterman use the market portfolio and the ex post volatility and correlation structure to back out implied returns to ...
vanguard2k's user avatar
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7 votes
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Marginal Risk Contribution Formula

concerning your first question: the derivative does not disappear: $\sigma(R_p)$ contains the square root. To be more precise, set $$ \sigma(R_p) = \sqrt{w_1^2\cdot\sigma(R_1)^2 + w_2^2\cdot\sigma(R_2)...
Cettt's user avatar
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7 votes

Portfolio Optimization and Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMV)

1) To be honest, any horizon is problematic in this respect. Simple sampling statistics 101 will tell you that the standard error around any estimate of true mean returns is the root time * variance. ...
demully's user avatar
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7 votes
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Can a capital market line have a negative slope?

Two separate cases were identified by R.C. Merton in 1972: In the economically more relevant case, where $r_f < b/c$, efficient portfolios are combinations of a long position in [the tangency] ...
nbbo2's user avatar
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7 votes
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Why does portfolio optimization require a positive-definite covariance matrix?

To supplement the other answer, yes there are optimization reasons for the covariance matrix being symmetric positive definite (SPD). All positive definite matrices are invertible and its inverse is ...
Quantoisseur's user avatar
7 votes

Contribution of an asset's variance to portfolio variance

In this answer, I am assuming that you want to keep correlations constant. To begin with, note that the $N\times N$ covariance matrix $\Sigma$ with element $\Sigma_{i,j}=Cov(x_i,x_j)$ can be written ...
Kermittfrog's user avatar
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7 votes
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What are the quantitative requirements to distinguish between asset classes?

Defining asset classes from a quantitative perspective is an interesting question that is not really addressed "officially" as far as I know. Let's try to write some requirements you want ...
lehalle's user avatar
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7 votes

What's the point of resampling?

The "estimation problem" in Portfolio Optimization is a serious one. The parameters (returns and covariances) are known very imprecisely. For example the covariance between stocks and bonds ...
nbbo2's user avatar
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6 votes
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Mean Variance Portfolio theory and real-world problem?

Mean-variance (MV) is a framework rather than a prescription. This framework allows one to make, discuss, and defend his investment decision. In practice, there are many ways to make adjustments to ...
Sergey Bushmanov's user avatar
6 votes
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Maximum Certainty Equivalent Portfolio with Transaction Costs

Seems like a small mistake in the last equation. It should read $\Delta^* = A^{-1} \left[\mu-\gamma \Sigma \omega_c - \frac{1}{\iota'A^{-1}\iota} \iota' A^{-1}(\mu-\gamma \Sigma \omega_c )\iota\...
krise's user avatar
  • 116
6 votes
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What's the importance of duality theory in portfolio optimization?

That's a pretty heavy question for this forum, and its answer is worthy of a semester-long discussion in a university course. The short answer is that (for convex optimization) the dual problem can ...
Tyler Olsen's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

How can I use a more efficient volatility estimator to improve the co-variance matrix?

Let $s$ be a $N\times1$ vector of standard deviations and $C$ be an $N\times N$ correlation matrix. The covariance matrix is equal to $$\Sigma=\text{diag}(s) \ C \ \text{diag}(s)$$ where $\text{diag}...
John's user avatar
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6 votes
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Generalized Mean Variance Portfolio

Something to perhaps realize is that your two problems may not be as different as you think if $\lambda$ is an ad-hoc parameter. For any solution to your 2nd problem (where $\theta > 1$), there ...
Matthew Gunn's user avatar
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