IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jomega/v30y2002i2p97-108.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimal market timing strategies under transaction costs

Author

Listed:
  • Li, Wei
  • Lam, Kin

Abstract

In this paper, we consider optimal market timing strategies under transaction costs. We assume that the asset's return follows an auto-regressive model and use long-term investment growth as the objective of a market timing strategy which entails the shifting of funds between a risky asset and a riskless asset. We give the optimal trading strategy for a finite investment horizon, and analyze its limiting behavior. For a finite horizon, the optimal decision in each step depends on two threshold values. If the return today is between the two values, nothing needs to be done, otherwise funds will be shifted from one asset to another, depending on which threshold value is being exceeded. When investment horizon tends to infinity, the optimal strategy converges to a stationary policy, which is shown to be closely related to a well-known technical trading rule, called Momentum Index trading rule. An integral equation of the two threshold values is given. Numerical results for the limiting stationary strategy are presented. The results confirm the obvious guess that the no-transaction region increases as the transaction cost increase. Finally, the limiting stationary strategy is applied to data in the Hang Seng Index Futures market in Hong Kong. The out-of-sample performance of the limiting stationary strategy is found to be better than the simple strategy used in literature, which is based on an 1-step ahead forecast of return.

Suggested Citation

  • Li, Wei & Lam, Kin, 2002. "Optimal market timing strategies under transaction costs," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 97-108, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jomega:v:30:y:2002:i:2:p:97-108
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305-0483(01)00060-3
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martha Douvogiannis & Joel Lander & Athanasios Orphanides, "undated". "Earnings Forecasts and the Predictability of Stock Returns: Evidence from Trading the S&P;," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1997-06, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 10 Dec 2019.
    2. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1988. "Permanent and Temporary Components of Stock Prices," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(2), pages 246-273, April.
    3. Admati, Anat R, et al, 1986. "On Timing and Selectivity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 715-730, July.
    4. Phelim Boyle & Xiaodong Lin, 1997. "Optimal Portfolio Selection with Transaction Costs," North American Actuarial Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(2), pages 27-39.
    5. De Bondt, Werner F M & Thaler, Richard, 1985. "Does the Stock Market Overreact?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 793-805, July.
    6. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May.
    7. Knez, Peter J & Ready, Mark J, 1996. "Estimating the Profits from Trading Strategies," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 9(4), pages 1121-1163.
    8. Stephen J. Brown & William N. Goetzmann & Alok Kumar, 1998. "The Dow Theory: William Peter Hamilton's Track Record Reconsidered," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(4), pages 1311-1333, August.
    9. Poterba, James M. & Summers, Lawrence H., 1988. "Mean reversion in stock prices : Evidence and Implications," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 27-59, October.
    10. Hodrick, Robert J. & Srivastava, Sanjay, 1987. "Foreign currency futures," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1-2), pages 1-24, February.
    11. Mark, Nelson C., 1988. "Time-varying betas and risk premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange contracts," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 335-354, December.
    12. George M. Constantinides, 1979. "Multiperiod Consumption and Investment Behavior with Convex Transactions Costs," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 25(11), pages 1127-1137, November.
    13. Stephen J. Brown & William N. Goetzmann & Alok Kumar, 1998. "The Dow Theory: William Peter Hamilton's Track Record Re-Considered," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires 98-013, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    14. Pesaran, M Hashem & Timmermann, Allan, 1995. "Predictability of Stock Returns: Robustness and Economic Significance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(4), pages 1201-1228, September.
    15. Cox, John C. & Huang, Chi-fu, 1989. "Optimal consumption and portfolio policies when asset prices follow a diffusion process," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 33-83, October.
    16. Magill, Michael J. P. & Constantinides, George M., 1976. "Portfolio selection with transactions costs," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 245-263, October.
    17. Conrad, Jennifer & Kaul, Gautam, 1989. "Mean Reversion in Short-Horizon Expected Returns," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 2(2), pages 225-240.
    18. Leitch, Gordon & Tanner, J Ernest, 1991. "Economic Forecast Evaluation: Profits versus the Conventional Error Measures," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(3), pages 580-590, June.
    19. Goodhart, C. A. E. & Figliuoli, L., 1991. "Every minute counts in financial markets," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 23-52, March.
    20. Gerard Gennotte & Alan Jung, 1994. "Investment Strategies under Transaction Costs: The Finite Horizon Case," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 40(3), pages 385-404, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. K. Lam & Wei Li, 2004. "Is the ‘Perfect’ Timing Strategy Truly Perfect?," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 22(1), pages 39-51, January.
    2. Hui Hong & Fergal O'Brien & James Ryan, 2014. "Inflation And The Subsequent Timing Of The Chinese Stock Market," Asian Academy of Management Journal of Accounting and Finance (AAMJAF), Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, vol. 10(2), pages 13-35.

    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. Kin Lam & Li Wei, "undated". "Optimal Trading Strategy When Return Process is AR(1)," Computing in Economics and Finance 1997 16, Society for Computational Economics.
    2. Lunde A. & Timmermann A., 2004. "Duration Dependence in Stock Prices: An Analysis of Bull and Bear Markets," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 22, pages 253-273, July.
    3. Rapach, David & Zhou, Guofu, 2013. "Forecasting Stock Returns," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 328-383, Elsevier.
    4. Nam, Kiseok & Pyun, Chong Soo & Kim, Sei-Wan, 2003. "Is asymmetric mean-reverting pattern in stock returns systematic? Evidence from Pacific-basin markets in the short-horizon," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 13(5), pages 481-502, December.
    5. Akarim, Yasemin Deniz & Sevim, Serafettin, 2013. "The impact of mean reversion model on portfolio investment strategies: Empirical evidence from emerging markets," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 453-459.
    6. Balvers, Ronald J. & Wu, Yangru, 2006. "Momentum and mean reversion across national equity markets," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 24-48, January.
    7. Stephen Foerster, 2011. "Double then Nothing: Why Stock Investments Relying on Simple Heuristics May Disappoint," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 3(2), pages 115-140, September.
    8. Goddard, John & Onali, Enrico, 2012. "Self-affinity in financial asset returns," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 1-11.
    9. Gropp, Jeffrey, 2004. "Mean reversion of industry stock returns in the U.S., 1926-1998," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 11(4), pages 537-551, September.
    10. Sandrine Jacob Leal, 2015. "Fundamentalists, chartists and asset pricing anomalies," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(11), pages 1837-1850, November.
    11. He, Xue-Zhong & Li, Kai & Li, Youwei, 2018. "Asset allocation with time series momentum and reversal," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 441-457.
    12. Jovanovic, Franck & Schinckus, Christophe, 2017. "Econophysics and Financial Economics: An Emerging Dialogue," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780190205034.
    13. Narayan, Paresh Kumar & Liu, Ruipeng & Westerlund, Joakim, 2016. "A GARCH model for testing market efficiency," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 121-138.
    14. Ashok Chanabasangouda Patil & Shailesh Rastogi, 2019. "Time-Varying Price–Volume Relationship and Adaptive Market Efficiency: A Survey of the Empirical Literature," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-18, June.
    15. Xu, Yexiao, 2004. "Small levels of predictability and large economic gains," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 247-275, March.
    16. Fernando Rubio, 2005. "Eficiencia De Mercado, Administracion De Carteras De Fondos Y Behavioural Finance," Finance 0503028, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 23 Jul 2005.
    17. Liam A. Gallagher & Mark P. Taylor, 2002. "Permanent and Temporary Components of Stock Prices: Evidence from Assessing Macroeconomic Shocks," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 69(2), pages 345-362, October.
    18. Erdos, Péter & Ormos, Mihály, 2010. "Random walk theory and the weak-form efficiency of the US art auction prices," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(5), pages 1062-1076, May.
    19. Stéphane Goutte & David Guerreiro & Bilel Sanhaji & Sophie Saglio & Julien Chevallier, 2019. "International Financial Markets," Post-Print halshs-02183053, HAL.
    20. Pu Shen, 2002. "Market timing strategies that worked," Research Working Paper RWP 02-01, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

    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:eee:jomega:v:30:y:2002:i:2:p:97-108. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/375/description#description .

    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.