IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7039.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On Portfolio Optimization: Forecasting Covariances and Choosing the Risk Model

Author

Listed:
  • Louis K.C. Chan
  • Jason Karceski
  • Josef Lakonishok

Abstract

We evaluate the performance of different models for the covariance structure of stock returns, focusing on their use for optimal portfolio selection. Comparisons are based on forecasts of future covariances as well as the out-of-sample volatility of optimized portfolios from each model. A few factors capture the general covariance structure but adding more factors does not improve forecast power. Portfolio optimization helps for risk control, but the different covariance models yield similar results. Using a tracking error volatility criterion, larger differences appear, with particularly favorable results for a heuristic approach based on matching the benchmark's attributes.

Suggested Citation

  • Louis K.C. Chan & Jason Karceski & Josef Lakonishok, 1999. "On Portfolio Optimization: Forecasting Covariances and Choosing the Risk Model," NBER Working Papers 7039, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7039
    Note: AP
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7039.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Elton, Edwin J & Gruber, Martin J & Urich, Thomas J, 1978. "Are Betas Best?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 33(5), pages 1375-1384, December.
    2. Alexander, Gordon J., 1978. "A Reevaluation of Alternative Portfolio Selection Models Applied to Common Stocks," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 13(1), pages 71-78, March.
    3. Richard A. Easterlin, 1992. "Analysis," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(4), pages 51-53, July.
    4. Connor, Gregory & Korajczyk, Robert A, 1993. "A Test for the Number of Factors in an Approximate Factor Model," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(4), pages 1263-1291, September.
    5. Pagan, Adrian R. & Schwert, G. William, 1990. "Alternative models for conditional stock volatility," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1-2), pages 267-290.
    6. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1997. "Industry costs of equity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 153-193, February.
    7. Schwert, G William & Seguin, Paul J, 1990. "Heteroskedasticity in Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(4), pages 1129-1155, September.
    8. Gregory Connor and Robert Korajczyk., 1987. "Risk and Return in an Equilibrium APT," Research Program in Finance Working Papers 174, University of California at Berkeley.
    9. Harry Markowitz, 1952. "Portfolio Selection," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 7(1), pages 77-91, March.
    10. Green, Richard C & Hollifield, Burton, 1992. "When Will Mean-Variance Efficient Portfolios Be Well Diversified?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 47(5), pages 1785-1809, December.
    11. Josef Lakonishok & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1992. "The Structure and Performance of the Money Management Industry," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 23(1992 Micr), pages 339-391.
    12. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1993. "Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 3-56, February.
    13. Nelson, Daniel B., 1992. "Filtering and forecasting with misspecified ARCH models I : Getting the right variance with the wrong model," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1-2), pages 61-90.
    14. Chan, Louis K. C. & Karceski, Jason & Lakonishok, Josef, 1998. "The Risk and Return from Factors," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 33(2), pages 159-188, June.
    15. Elton, Edwin J & Gruber, Martin J, 1973. "Estimating the Dependence Structure of Share Prices-Implications for Portfolio Selection," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 28(5), pages 1203-1232, December.
    16. Frost, Peter A. & Savarino, James E., 1986. "An Empirical Bayes Approach to Efficient Portfolio Selection," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(3), pages 293-305, September.
    17. Merton, Robert C., 1980. "On estimating the expected return on the market : An exploratory investigation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 323-361, December.
    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. Ravi Jagannathan & Tongshu Ma, 2003. "Risk Reduction in Large Portfolios: Why Imposing the Wrong Constraints Helps," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(4), pages 1651-1683, August.
    2. Ledoit, Olivier & Wolf, Michael, 2003. "Improved estimation of the covariance matrix of stock returns with an application to portfolio selection," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(5), pages 603-621, December.
    3. Behr, Patrick & Guettler, Andre & Miebs, Felix, 2013. "On portfolio optimization: Imposing the right constraints," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1232-1242.
    4. Behr, Patrick & Guettler, Andre & Truebenbach, Fabian, 2012. "Using industry momentum to improve portfolio performance," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(5), pages 1414-1423.
    5. Peralta, Gustavo & Zareei, Abalfazl, 2016. "A network approach to portfolio selection," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 38(PA), pages 157-180.
    6. Michael W. Brandt & Pedro Santa-Clara & Rossen Valkanov, 2009. "Parametric Portfolio Policies: Exploiting Characteristics in the Cross-Section of Equity Returns," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(9), pages 3411-3447, September.
    7. Adrian, Tobias & Franzoni, Francesco, 2009. "Learning about beta: Time-varying factor loadings, expected returns, and the conditional CAPM," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(4), pages 537-556, September.
    8. Dangl, Thomas & Randl, Otto & Zechner, Josef, 2016. "Risk control in asset management: Motives and concepts," CFS Working Paper Series 546, Center for Financial Studies (CFS).
    9. Xing, Xin & Hu, Jinjin & Yang, Yaning, 2014. "Robust minimum variance portfolio with L-infinity constraints," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 107-117.
    10. Yan, Cheng & Zhang, Huazhu, 2017. "Mean-variance versus naïve diversification: The role of mispricing," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 61-81.
    11. Levy, Moshe & Ritov, Yaacov, 2001. "Portfolio Optimization with Many Assets: The Importance of Short-Selling," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt41x4t67m, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    12. James DiLellio, 2015. "A Kalman filter control technique in mean-variance portfolio management," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 39(2), pages 235-261, April.
    13. Weidong Tian & Qing Zhou, 2017. "Asset Pricing Model Uncertainty: A Tradeoff between Bias and Variance," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 17(2), pages 289-324, June.
    14. Gregory Bauer & Keith Vorkink, 2007. "Multivariate Realized Stock Market Volatility," Staff Working Papers 07-20, Bank of Canada.
    15. Louis K. C. Chan & Jason Karceski & Josef Lakonishok, 1997. "The Risk and Return from Factors," NBER Working Papers 6098, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Tobias Adrian & Joshua Rosenberg, 2008. "Stock Returns and Volatility: Pricing the Short‐Run and Long‐Run Components of Market Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(6), pages 2997-3030, December.
    17. Bali, Turan G. & Cakici, Nusret & Levy, Haim, 2008. "A model-independent measure of aggregate idiosyncratic risk," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 15(5), pages 878-896, December.
    18. Bollerslev, Tim & Engle, Robert F. & Nelson, Daniel B., 1986. "Arch models," Handbook of Econometrics, in: R. F. Engle & D. McFadden (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 49, pages 2959-3038, Elsevier.
    19. Gregory Connor & Lisa R. Goldberg & Robert A. Korajczyk, 2010. "Portfolio Risk Analysis," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9224.
    20. Frahm, Gabriel & Memmel, Christoph, 2010. "Dominating estimators for minimum-variance portfolios," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 159(2), pages 289-302, December.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    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:nbr:nberwo:7039. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

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

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.