Efficient computation of mean reverting portfolios using cyclical coordinate descent

Abstract

The econometric challenge of finding sparse mean reverting portfolios based on a subset of a large number of assets is well known. Many current state-of-the-art approaches fall into the field of co-integration theory, where the problem is phrased in terms of an eigenvector problem with sparsity constraint. Although a number of approximate solutions have been proposed to solve this NP-hard problem, all are based on relatively simple models and are limited in their scalability. In this paper, we leverage information obtained from a heterogeneous simultaneous graphical dynamic linear model (H-SGDLM) and propose a novel formulation of the mean reversion problem, which is phrased in terms of a quasi-convex minimisation with a normalisation constraint. This new formulation allows us to employ a cyclical coordinate descent algorithm for efficiently computing an exact sparse solution, even in a large universe of assets, while the use of H-SGDLM data allows us to easily control the required level of sparsity. We demonstrate the flexibility, speed and scalability of the proposed approach on S&P500, FX and ETF futures data.