Evolutionary Finance for Multi-Asset Investors

Abstract

Standard strategic asset allocation procedures usually neglect market interaction. However, returns are not generated in a vacuum but the result of the market’s price discovery mechanism. Evolutionary finance accounts for this and endogenizes asset prices. This paper develops a multi-asset evolutionary finance model. Requiring little more than dividend and interest rate data, it provides a valuable guide to this class of models. While traditional mean/variance optimization is concerned with finding the optimal allocation, evolutionary finance’s focus is on finding the optimal strategy. This paper shows that yield-based strategies outperform competing alternatives and are evolutionarily advantageous for multi-asset investors.