Skip to main content
Log in

Large portfolio optimisation approaches

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Journal of Asset Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper makes an empirical comparison of prominent methods in portfolio optimisation, such as nodewise regression, the sample covariance matrix, observable factor model-based covariance matrices, linear and nonlinear shrinkage methods, and principal orthogonal complement thresholding (POET) estimators. Empirically, we find that the nodewise regression approach that uses a direct estimator of the sparse inverse covariance matrix improves portfolio performance among existing methods in mean-variance portfolio optimisation when the number of stocks is greater than the number of observations.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Availability of data and materials

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the authors upon request.

Notes

  1. Proofs related to these theorems are presented in online supplementary material https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/07350015.2019.1683018?scroll=top &role=tab.

  2. One-year t-bill rate is obtained from the website, https://datastore.borsaistanbul.com/.

References

  • Antoniadis, A., and J. Fan. 2001. Regularization of wavelet approximations. Journal of the American Statistical Association 96: 939–967.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bai, J., and S. Ng. 2002. Determining the number of factors in approximate factor models. Econometrica 70 (1): 191–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bali, T.G., and N. Cakici. 2010. World market risk, country-specific risk and expected returns in international stock markets. Journal of Banking & Finance 34 (6): 1152–1165.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ban, G.Y., N. El Karoui, and A.E.B. Lim. 2018. Machine learning and portfolio optimization. Management Science 64 (3): 1136–1154.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bekaert, G., and C.R. Harvey. 1997. Emerging equity market volatility. Journal of Financial Economics 43 (1): 29–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bickel, P.J., and E. Levina. 2008. Regularized estimation of large covariance matrices. The Annals of Statistics 36 (1): 199–227.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bodnar, T., A.K. Gupta, and N. Parolya. 2014. On the strong convergence of the optimal linear shrinkage estimator for large dimensional covariance matrix. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 132: 215–228.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cai, T., and W. Liu. 2011. Adaptive thresholding for sparse covariance matrix estimation. Journal of the American Statistical Association 106 (494): 672–684.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cakici, N., F.J. Fabozzi, and S. Tan. 2013. Size, value, and momentum in emerging market stock returns. Emerging Markets Review 16: 46–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callot, L., M. Caner, A.Ö. Önder, and E. Ulaşan. 2021. A nodewise regression approach to estimating large portfolios. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 39 (2): 520–531.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choi, Y.G., J. Lim, and S. Choi. 2019. High-dimensional markowitz portfolio optimization problem: Empirical comparison of covariance matrix estimators. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation 89 (7): 1278–1300.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DeMiguel, V., L. Garlappi, and R. Uppal. 2009. Optimal versus naive diversification: How inefficient is the 1/N portfolio strategy? Review of Financial Studies 22 (5): 1915–1953.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fama, E.F., and K.R. French. 1993. Common risk factors in the returns on stocks and bonds. Journal of Financial Economics 33 (1): 3–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fama, E.F., and K.R. French. 2015. A five-factor asset pricing model. Journal of Financial Economics 116 (1): 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, J., Y. Fan, and J. Lv. 2008. High dimensional covariance matrix estimation using a factor model. Journal of Econometrics 147 (1): 186–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, J., Y. Liao, and M. Mincheva. 2011. High-dimensional covariance matrix estimation in approximate factor models. The Annals of Statistics 39 (6): 3320–3356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, J., Y. Liao, and X. Shi. 2015. Risks of large portfolios. Journal of Econometrics 186 (2): 367–387.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, Y., and C. Tang. 2013. Tuning parameter selection in high dimensional penalized likelihood. Journal of Royal Statistical Society Series B 75: 531–552.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, J., T. Hastie, and R. Tibshirani. 2010. Regularization paths for generalized linear models via coordinate descent. Journal of Statistical Software 33 (1): 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg, L.R., and A.N. Kercheval. 2023. James-Stein for the leading eigenvector. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120 (2): e2207046120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207046120.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guastaroba, G., G. Mitra, and M.G. Speranza. 2011. Investigating the effectiveness of robust portfolio optimization techniques. Journal of Asset Management 12 (4): 260–280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jian, Z., P. Deng, and Z. Zhu. 2018. High-dimensional covariance forecasting based on principal component analysis of high-frequency data. Economic Modelling 75: 422–431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnstone, I.M. 2001. On the distribution of the largest eigenvalue in principal components analysis. Annals of Statistics 29 (2): 295–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kolev, G.I., and R. Karapandza. 2017. Out-of-sample equity premium predictability and sample split-invariant inference. Journal of Banking & Finance 84: 188–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kourtis, A., G. Dotsis, and R.N. Markellos. 2012. Parameter uncertainty in portfolio selection: Shrinking the inverse covariance matrix. Journal of Banking & Finance 36: 2522–2531.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledoit, O., and M. Wolf. 2004. A well-conditioned estimator for large-dimensional covariance matrices. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 88 (2): 365–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledoit, O., and M. Wolf. 2008. Robust performance hypothesis testing with the Sharpe ratio. Journal of Empirical Finance 15 (5): 850–859.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledoit, O., and M. Wolf. 2015. Spectrum estimation: A unified framework for covariance matrix estimation and PCA in large dimensions. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 139: 360–384.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ledoit, O., and M. Wolf. 2022. The power of (non-)linear shrinking: A review and guide to covariance matrix estimation. Journal of Financial Econometrics 20 (1): 187–218.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li, J. 2015. Sparse and stable portfolio selection with parameter uncertainty. Journal of Business & Economic Statistics 33 (3): 381–392.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Markowitz, H. 1952. Portfolio selection. The Journal of Finance 7 (1): 77–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meinshausen, N., and P. Bühlmann. 2006. High-dimensional graphs and variable selection with the Lasso. The Annals of Statistics 34 (3): 1436–1462.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michaud, R.O. 1989. The Markowitz optimization enigma: Is optimized optimal. Financial Analysts Journal 45 (1): 31–42.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pantaleo, E., M. Tumminello, F. Lillo, and R.N. Mantegna. 2010. When do improved covariance matrix estimators enhance portfolio optimization? An empirical comparative study of nine estimators. Quantitative Finance 11: 1067–1080.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • R Core Team. 2015. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

  • Reyna, F.R.Q., A.M.D. Júnior, B.V.M. Mendes, and O. Porto. 2005. Optimal portfolio structuring in emerging stock markets using robust statistics. Brazilian Review of Econometrics 25 (2): 139–157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rothman, A.J., E. Levina, and J. Zhu. 2009. Generalized thresholding of large covariance matrices. Journal of the American Statistical Association 104 (485): 177–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubio, F., X. Mestre, and D.P. Palomar. 2012. Performance analysis and optimal selection of large minimum variance portfolios under estimation risk. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 6 (4): 337–350.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scherer, B. 2006. A note on the out-of-sample performance of resampled efficiency. Journal of Asset Management 7 (3): 170–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tang, X., X. Gao, Q. Zhou, and J. Ma. 2020. The BSS-FM estimation of international assets allocation for China mainland investors. Emerging Markets Finance and Trade 56 (6): 1224–1236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tayalı, H.A., and S. Tolun. 2018. Dimension reduction in mean-variance portfolio optimization. Expert Systems with Applications 92: 161–169.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tibshirani, R. 1996. Regression shrinkage and selection via the lasso. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 58: 267–288.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuna, G. 2012. The effect of covariance matrix estimation on portfolio selection process: The application for different investment horizons in ISE. Ege Academic Review 12 (3): 311–322.

    Google Scholar 

  • van de Geer, S., P. Bühlmann, Y. Ritov, and R. Dezeure. 2014. On asymptotically optimal confidence regions and tests for high-dimensional models. The Annals of Statistics 42 (3): 1166–1202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang, W., and J. Fan. 2017. Asymptotics of empirical eigenstructure for high dimensional spiked covariance. The Annals of Statistics 45 (3): 1342–1374.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, Q., Y. Zhou, C. Jiang, K. Yu, and X. Niu. 2016. A large CVaR-based portfolio selection model with weight constraints. Economic Modelling 59: 436–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ege University Planning and Monitoring Coordination of Organizational Development and Directorate of Library and Documentation for their support in editing and proofreading service of this study.

Funding

The authors did not receive support from any organization for the submitted work

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Data collection and analysis were performed by EU. The first draft of the manuscript was written by all authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. Özlem Önder.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Monthly Portfolio performance of \(T=96\), \(n-T=36\)
Table 6 Daily Period: Portfolio Performance of \(T=2002\), \(n-T=750\)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ulasan, E., Önder, A.Ö. Large portfolio optimisation approaches. J Asset Manag 24, 485–497 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41260-023-00322-3

Download citation

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41260-023-00322-3

Keywords

Navigation