Multiperiod Telser’s Safety-First Portfolio Selection with Regime Switching

This paper investigates a multiperiod Telser’s safety-first portfolio selection model with regime switching where the returns of the assets are assumed to depend on the market states modulated by a discrete-time Markov chain. The investor aims to maximize the expected terminal wealth and does not want the probability of the terminal wealth to fall short of a disaster level to exceed a predetermined number called the risk control level. Referring to Tchebycheff inequality, we modify Telser’s safety-first model to the case that aims to maximize the expected terminal wealth subject to a constraint where the upper bound of the disaster probability is less than the risk control level. By the Lagrange multiplier technique and the embedding method, we study in detail the existence of the optimal strategy and derive the closed-form optimal strategy. Finally, by mathematical and numerical analysis, we analyze the effects of the disaster level, the risk control level, the transition matrix of the Markov chain, the expected excess return, and the variance of the risky return.