IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tas/wpaper/17314.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Australian investors need to know to diversity their portfolios

Author

Abstract

According to a report by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2008, most (78%) of Australian investors had heard the term diversification. Nevertheless, around half of investors (49%) held only one type of investment (shares only) with the average number of holdings of 2.19 securities. More telling, a third (33%) of share owners acquired their shares passively (as part of a demutualisation or had received shares through an inheritance or gift), while almost two-thirds (63%) of share owners acquired the shares actively. One conclusion is that Australian investors, on average, own poorly diversified portfolios and leave themselves exposed to excessive diversifiable risk. To study this issue, we simulate portfolios using daily observations for all traded and delisted equities in Australia between 1975 and 2011. We calculate two measures of risk, including heavy tailed to account for extreme events. For each risk measure, we recommend the number of portfolio holdings that result in a 90% reduction in diversifiable risk for an average and a more conservative investor. We find that, on average, 24 to 30 stocks are sufficient to attain a well-diversified portfolio.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexeev, Vitali & Tapon, Francis, 2013. "What Australian investors need to know to diversity their portfolios," Working Papers 2013-17, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 20 Nov 2013.
    • Handle: RePEc:tas:wpaper:17314
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.utas.edu.au/17314/1/2013-17_Alexeev_and_Tapon_-_What_Australian_investors_need_to_know_to_diversify_their_portfolios.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ron Bird & Mark Tippett, 1986. "Note---Naive Diversification and Portfolio Risk---A Note," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 32(2), pages 244-251, February.
    2. John Y. Campbell & Martin Lettau & Burton G. Malkiel & Yexiao Xu, 2001. "Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(1), pages 1-43, February.
    3. Alexeev, Vitali & Tapon, Francis, 2013. "Equity Portfolio Diversification: How Many Stocks are Enough? Evidence from Five Developed Markets," Working Papers 2013-16, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 20 Nov 2013.
    4. Simone Brands & David R. Gallagher, 2005. "Portfolio selection, diversification and fund‐of‐funds: a note," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 45(2), pages 185-197, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alexeev, Vitali & Tapon, Francis, 2013. "Equity Portfolio Diversification: How Many Stocks are Enough? Evidence from Five Developed Markets," Working Papers 2013-16, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 20 Nov 2013.
    2. Vitali Alexeev & Francis Tapon, 2014. "The number of stocks in your portfolio should be larger than you think: diversification evidence from five developed markets," Published Paper Series 2014-4, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    3. Azra Zaimovic & Adna Omanovic & Almira Arnaut-Berilo, 2021. "How Many Stocks Are Sufficient for Equity Portfolio Diversification? A Review of the Literature," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-30, November.
    4. K. Liagkouras & K. Metaxiotis, 2019. "Improving the performance of evolutionary algorithms: a new approach utilizing information from the evolutionary process and its application to the fuzzy portfolio optimization problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 272(1), pages 119-137, January.
    5. Vitali Alexeev & Mardi Dungey, 2015. "Equity portfolio diversification with high frequency data," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(7), pages 1205-1215, July.
    6. Florin Aliu & Besnik Krasniqi & Adriana Knapkova & Fisnik Aliu, 2019. "Interdependence and Risk Comparison of Slovak, Hungarian and Polish Stock Markets: Policy and Managerial Implications," Acta Oeconomica, Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary, vol. 69(2), pages 273-287, June.
    7. Sirapat Polwitoon & Oranee Tawatnuntachai, 2013. "In Search of Optimal Number of Bond Funds," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 3(1), pages 1-5.
    8. K. Liagkouras & K. Metaxiotis, 2018. "A new efficiently encoded multiobjective algorithm for the solution of the cardinality constrained portfolio optimization problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 267(1), pages 281-319, August.
    9. Alexeev, Vitali & Tapon, Francis, 2014. "How many stocks are enough for diversifying Canadian institutional portfolios?," Working Papers 2014-08, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 2014.
    10. Humphrey, Jacquelyn E. & Benson, Karen L. & Low, Rand K.Y. & Lee, Wei-Lun, 2015. "Is diversification always optimal?," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 35(PB), pages 521-532.
    11. Haensly, Paul J., 2020. "Risk decomposition, estimation error, and naïve diversification," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    12. J. Cuñado & L. Gil-Alana & F. Gracia, 2009. "US stock market volatility persistence: evidence before and after the burst of the IT bubble," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 33(3), pages 233-252, October.
    13. Rand Kwong Yew Low, 2018. "Vine copulas: modelling systemic risk and enhancing higher‐moment portfolio optimisation," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 58(S1), pages 423-463, November.
    14. Phylaktis, Kate & Xia, Lichuan, 2006. "Sources of firms' industry and country effects in emerging markets," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 459-475, April.
    15. Laura L. Veldkamp, 2006. "Information Markets and the Comovement of Asset Prices," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 73(3), pages 823-845.
    16. Cavit Pakel & Neil Shephard & Kevin Sheppard & Robert F. Engle, 2021. "Fitting Vast Dimensional Time-Varying Covariance Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(3), pages 652-668, July.
    17. Abugri, Benjamin A. & Dutta, Sandip, 2014. "Are we overestimating REIT idiosyncratic risk? Analysis of pricing effects and persistence," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 249-259.
    18. Dimitrios D. Thomakos & Michail S. Koubouros, 2011. "The Role of Realised Volatility in the Athens Stock Exchange," Multinational Finance Journal, Multinational Finance Journal, vol. 15(1-2), pages 87-124, March - J.
    19. Fu Qiao & Yan Yan, 2020. "A Demand-Oriented Industry-Specific Volatility Spillover Network Analysis of China’s Stock Market around the Outbreak of COVID-19," Asian Economic and Financial Review, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 10(11), pages 1321-1341, November.
    20. Nick Bloom & Stephen Bond & John Van Reenen, 2007. "Uncertainty and Investment Dynamics," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(2), pages 391-415.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Portfolio diversification; expected shortfall; standard deviation; Australian equities.;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tas:wpaper:17314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oscar Pavlov (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dutasau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.