A generalized approach to sparse and stable portfolio optimization problem

Abstract

In this paper, we firstly examine the relation between the portfolio weights norm constraints method and the objective function regularization method in portfolio selection problems. We find that the portfolio weights norm constrained method mainly tries to obtain stable portfolios, however, the objective function regularization method mainly aims at obtaining sparse portfolios. Then, we propose some general sparse and stable portfolio models by imposing both portfolio weights norm constraints and objective function $L_{1}$ regularization term. Finally, three empirical studies show that the proposed strategies have better out-of-sample performance and lower turnover than many other strategies for tested datasets.