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Active Portfolio Management in Concentrated Equity Markets

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  • Brian Ceco
  • Xiaofei Shi
  • Ting-Kam Leonard Wong

Abstract

The equal-weighted portfolio is a passive, rule-based strategy that has historically been difficult to outperform, delivering higher returns than the capitalization-weighted "market" benchmark across many markets and periods. Stochastic portfolio theory (SPT) reveals that this relative performance is regime dependent, with the equal-weighted portfolio underperforming during periods of increasing market concentration and high correlations, particularly market bubbles. These observations have motivated us to formulate and solve a stochastic control problem in which an investor actively allocates between the equal-weighted and market portfolios. The investor bases their allocation decisions on forecasts made under a flexible stochastic diversity--dispersion (SDD) model. Using a quadratic surrogate for implementation frictions, we characterize the optimal allocation through a linear forward--backward SDE and obtain an explicit "aiming in front of a moving target" representation of the optimal trading rate, in the spirit of G\^arleanu and Pedersen. The penalty parameters are calibrated in sample to match the cumulative wealth effect of proportional transaction costs, while out-of-sample performance is evaluated with those costs deducted directly from portfolio wealth. Using historical S&P 500 data, we show that a mean-reverting SDD specification reproduces several empirical features of market diversity and dispersion. In out-of-sample backtests from 1995 to 2024, the resulting strategies deliver higher cumulative net returns than both the equal-weighted and market portfolios, and higher information ratios than the equal-weighted portfolio after 15-basis-point proportional transaction costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Brian Ceco & Xiaofei Shi & Ting-Kam Leonard Wong, 2026. "Active Portfolio Management in Concentrated Equity Markets," Papers 2609.27113, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2026.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2609.27113
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