Portfolio Optimization under Lower Partial Risk Measures

Abstract

Portfolio management using lower partial risk (downside risk) measures is attracting more attention of practitioners in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to review important characteristics of these riskmeasures and conduct simulation using four alternative measures, lower semi-variance, lower semi-absolute deviation, first order below targetrisk and conditional value-at-risk.We will show that these risk measures are useful to control downside risk whenthe distribution of assets is non-symmetric. Further, we will propose a computational scheme to resolve the difficultyassociated with solving a large dense linear programming problems resulting from these models. We will demonstrate that this method can in fact solve problems consisting of104 assets and 105 scenarios within a practical amount of CPU time.