Optimal Portfolio Research Articles

Cryptocurrency Portfolio Allocation under Credibilistic CVaR Criterion and Practical Constraints

The cryptocurrency market offers attractive but risky investment opportunities, characterized by rapid growth, extreme volatility, and uncertainty. Traditional risk management models, which rely on probabilistic assumptions and historical data, often fail to capture the market’s unique dynamics and unpredictability. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces a novel portfolio optimization model tailored for the cryptocurrency market, leveraging a credibilistic CVaR framework. CVaR was chosen as the primary risk measure because it is a downside risk measure that focuses on extreme losses, making it particularly effective in managing the heightened risk of significant downturns in volatile markets like cryptocurrencies. The model employs credibility theory and trapezoidal fuzzy variables to more accurately capture the high levels of uncertainty and volatility that characterize digital assets. Unlike traditional probabilistic approaches, this model provides a more adaptive and precise risk management strategy. The proposed approach also incorporates practical constraints, including cardinality and floor and ceiling constraints, ensuring that the portfolio remains diversified, balanced, and aligned with real-world considerations such as transaction costs and regulatory requirements. Empirical analysis demonstrates the model’s effectiveness in constructing well-diversified portfolios that balance risk and return, offering significant advantages for investors in the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency market. This research contributes to the field of investment management by advancing the application of sophisticated portfolio optimization techniques to digital assets, providing a robust framework for managing risk in an increasingly complex financial landscape.

Interlinkage between lending and borrowing tokens and US equity sector: Implications for social finance

Decentralized peer-to-peer social network-based platforms and financial products (i.e., tokens) are emerging phenomena in the area of social finance. This paper explores the return and volatility spillovers between Lending and Borrowing tokens and US equity sectors using the TVP-VAR framework. The results indicate a considerable static return and volatility spillovers between tokens and sectors. Most equity sectors are net transmitters of return and volatility spillovers, whereas tokens are more net receivers. Moreover, our findings show that dynamic return and volatility spillovers vary over time and experience a significant rise during the initial phase of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the second quarter of 2022. Finally, we explore the portfolio implication of DeFi and find that the hedge effectiveness scores are significantly greater than zero at a 1 % significant level for all optimal weights and hedge ratios of sector/token pairs, suggesting that investors and portfolio managers should consider adding tokens to their equity sector portfolios and adjust the portfolio allocations over time to achieve diversification benefits. This paper explores the association between social finance-based emerging tokens and traditional equity markets, providing insightful information to policymakers and portfolio managers regarding diversification, hedging, and risk management.

Power generation mix in Colombia including wind power: Markowitz portfolio efficient frontier analysis with machine learning

The Colombian power market is hydro-dominated since 67 % of the power produced comes from hydro-power sources. In addition, it has thermal power from natural gas and coal, and in the last years, alternative energy sources such as wind and solar have been introduced, although so far their share is not significant. Due to this condition, the Colombian power market is very volatile and depends on weather conditions. Usually, in rainy seasons prices are low and power is available, while in dry seasons, prices are high and power can be scarce. One of the main advantages of the new energy sources is that they are complementary to hydro-power, in the case of wind regimes, they are higher during dry seasons and lower during rainy seasons. We propose a complementarity analysis in the energy mix using Markowitz Portfolio analysis to determine if the efficient frontier is improved by introducing wind power to the system and the traditional port-folio analysis is improved by introducing Machine Learning (ML) into calculations. Results show that wind power improves the return while minimizing risk. Therefore, wind power would significantly reduce prices in Colombia's power mix while reducing volatility. This work follows the Open Innovation (OI) paradigm, the intersection of Machine Learning, portfolio optimization, and renewable energy presents a promising landscape for research and practical applications. Continued interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation are essential for harnessing the full potential of these technologies for a sustainable energy future.

Reinforcement learning-based portfolio optimization with deterministic state transition

Portfolio optimization has attracted substantial interest within the artificial intelligence community due to its significant impact on financial decision-making, risk management, and market analysis. Reinforcement learning fits well with portfolio optimization because their goal is to maximize cumulative returns. In reinforcement learning, state transition probabilities are often unknown and must be estimated. However, in portfolio backtesting experiments, these probabilities are deterministic, making the conventional reinforcement learning approach to estimating state transitions suboptimal for portfolio optimization. Addressing this issue, this study decomposes the portfolio optimization into two core tasks: prediction and profit policy optimization and proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework that assumes deterministic state transition probabilities, comprised of three main modules: feature extraction, prediction, and profit strategy optimization. To model assets more effectively and comprehensively, we capture their temporal features, relational features, and market state. We introduce a patch-wise correlation method and attribute based gate to enhance feature extraction. In the profit policy module, we utilize a deterministic strategy, employing a recursive reinforcement learning method based on Monte Carlo sampling to train the policy network. This enables dynamic adjustments of asset investment weights, ensuring the maximization of cumulative returns. Extensive experiments conducted on cryptocurrency datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, and achieving 36.6%-75.6% improvements in main measurements on cryptocurrency datasets.

Optimal annuitization under stochastic interest rates

Abstract The decision about when and how much to annuitize is an important element of the retirement planning of most individuals. Optimal annuitization strategies depend on the individual’s exposure to annuity risk, meaning the possibility of meeting unfavorable personal and market conditions at the time of the annuitization decision. This article studies optimal annuitization strategies within a life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice model, focusing on stochastic interest rates as an important source of annuity risk. Closing a gap in the existing literature, our numerical results across different model variants reveal several typical structural effects of interest rate risk on the annuitization decision, which may however vary depending on preference specifications and alternative investment opportunities: When allowing for gradual annuitization, annuity risk is temporally diversified by spreading annuity purchases over the whole pre-retirement period, with annuity market participation starting earlier in the life cycle and becoming more extensive with increasing interest rate risk. Ruling out this temporal diversification possibility, as embedded in many institutional settings, incurs significant welfare losses, which are increasing with higher interest rate risk, together with larger overall demand for annuitization.

PENGUKURAN RISIKO PORTOFOLIO SAHAM JAKARTA ISLAMIC INDEX DENGAN STOCHASTIC DOMINANCE

Stocks is one of the assets which has a high level of liquidity. Optimizing stock investment can be done by diversifying the portfolio. Stochastic Dominance is a portfolio formation method that looks at the amount of dominance of each stock pair. This study’s purpose is to apply the Stochastic Dominance method to create an optimal portfolio on sharia index called JII from April 2018 to March 2022. This study indicate that out of the 5 selected stocks, there are 4 stocks that dominate each stock pair, including ADRO, ICBP, PTBA, UNTR. ADRO proportion are 57,14% while ADRO, PTBA, and UNTR’s proportion are each 14,28%. The level of risk on this research is measured by a VaR with historical simulation method. Using this method, the maximum potential loss of the formed portfolio for the next month is 8.5% at a 95% confidence level.

Optimal Market Completion through Financial Derivatives with Applications to Volatility Risk

This paper investigates the optimal choices of financial derivatives to complete a financial market in the framework of stochastic volatility (SV) models. We first introduce an efficient and accurate simulation-based method applicable to generalized diffusion models to approximate the optimal derivatives-based portfolio strategy. We build upon a double optimization approach, i.e., expected utility maximization and risk exposure minimization, already proposed in the literature, demonstrating that strangle options are the best choices for market completion within equity options. They lead to lower investors’ risk exposure for a wide range of strikes compared to the lesser flexibility of calls, puts, and strangles. Furthermore, we explore the benefit of using volatility index derivatives and conclude that they could be more convenient substitutes when short-term maturity equity options are not available.

A Hierarchical Approach to a Tri-Objective Portfolio Optimization Problem Considering an ESG Index

Traditional portfolio construction primarily revolves around a bi-objective approach, focusing on minimizing portfolio variance while maximizing expected returns. However, this approach leaves out other objectives that could interest decision makers. In this work, we incorporate an extra objective, namely the environmental, social, and governance index (ESG), as a secondary objective. This addition empowers investors to customize their portfolios by defining explicit trade-off thresholds between expected returns and risk, considering the ESG index. To achieve this goal, we make use of external archiving techniques and evolutionary algorithms. In particular, we first find approximate solutions to the bi-objective problem; then, we look for efficient solutions for ESG. We tested our approach with data on the Dow Jones, S&P500, and Nasdaq100 from Yahoo Finance. The results show that the proposed methodology can identify portfolios with good returns and risks considering ESG.

Applying portfolio theory to benefit endangered amphibians in coastal wetlands threatened by climate change, high uncertainty, and significant investment risk

The challenge of selecting strategies to adapt to climate change is complicated by the presence of irreducible uncertainties regarding future conditions. Decisions regarding long-term investments in conservation actions contain significant risk of failure due to these inherent uncertainties. To address this challenge, decision makers need an arsenal of sophisticated but practical tools to help guide spatial conservation strategies. Theory asserts that managing risks can be achieved by diversifying an investment portfolio to include assets – such as stocks and bonds – that respond inversely to one another under a given set of conditions. We demonstrate an approach for formalizing the diversification of conservation assets (land parcels) and actions (restoration, species reintroductions) by using correlation structure to quantify the degree of risk for any proposed management investment. We illustrate a framework for identifying future habitat refugia by integrating species distribution modeling, scenarios of climate change and sea level rise, and impacts to critical habitat. Using the plains coqui (Eleutherodactylus juanariveroi), an endangered amphibian known from only three small wetland populations on Puerto Rico’s coastal plains, we evaluate the distribution of potential refugia under two model parameterizations and four future sea-level rise scenarios. We then apply portfolio theory using two distinct objective functions and eight budget levels to inform investment strategies for mitigating risk and increasing species persistence probability. Models project scenario-specific declines in coastal freshwater wetlands from 2% to nearly 30% and concurrent expansions of transitional marsh and estuarine open water. Conditional on the scenario, island-wide species distribution is predicted to contract by 25% to 90%. Optimal portfolios under the first objective function – benefit maximization – emphasizes translocating frogs to existing protected areas rather than investing in the protection of new habitat. Alternatively, optimal strategies using the second objective function – a risk-benefit tradeoff framework – include significant investment to protect parcels for the purpose of reintroduction or establishing new populations. These findings suggest that leveraging existing protected areas for species persistence, while less costly, may contain excessive risk and could result in diminished conservation benefits. Although our modeling includes numerous assumptions and simplifications, we believe this framework provides useful inference for exploring resource dynamics and developing robust adaptation strategies using an approach that is generalizable to other conservation problems which are spatial or portfolio in nature and subject to unresolvable uncertainty.

The Smirnov Property for Weighted Lebesgue Spaces

We establish lower norm bounds for multivariate functions within weighted Lebesgue spaces, characterised by a summation of functions whose components solve a system of nonlinear integral equations. This problem originates in portfolio selection theory, where these equations allow one to identify mean-variance optimal portfolios, composed of standard European options on several underlying assets. We elaborate on the Smirnov property—an integrability condition for the weights that guarantees the uniqueness of solutions to the system. Sufficient conditions on weights to satisfy this property are provided, and counterexamples are constructed, where either the Smirnov property does not hold or the uniqueness of solutions fails.

Portfolio optimization with feedback strategies based on artificial neural networks

Dynamic portfolio optimization has significantly benefited from a wider adoption of deep learning (DL). While existing research has focused on how DL can applied to solving the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation, some very recent developments propose to forego the derivation of HJB in favor of empirical utility maximization over dynamic allocation strategies expressed through artificial neural networks. In addition to simplicity and transparency, this approach is universally applicable, as it is essentially agnostic about market dynamics. We apply it to optimal portfolio allocation between cash account and risky asset following Heston model. The results appear on par with theoretical ones.

Implementation of machine learning in $$\ell _{\infty }$$-based sparse Sharpe ratio portfolio optimization: a case study on Indian stock market

Implementation of machine learning in $$\ell _{\infty }$$-based sparse Sharpe ratio portfolio optimization: a case study on Indian stock market

Portfolio optimization by enhanced LinUCB

We study portfolio optimization through reinforcement learning, employing the contextual LinUCB approach to build an investment portfolio with changing market conditions. Contextual information enhances the LinUCB technique recommendation process, maximizing the efficacy of the model and the cumulative return. The recommendation criteria are to achieve the maximum level of confidence regarding the uncertainty surrounding the upward trend of asset returns within the pool of assets. Employing stocks from the Chinese A-share market, Hong Kong market, and US market as empirical tests, our findings demonstrate that the proposed model consistently outperforms the benchmark indices in our backtesting process.

Economic Theory and Machine Learning Integration in Asset Pricing and Portfolio Optimization: A Bibliometric Analysis and Conceptual Framework

Economic Theory and Machine Learning Integration in Asset Pricing and Portfolio Optimization: A Bibliometric Analysis and Conceptual Framework

Multi-asset portfolio model optimization based on mean multifractal detrended cross correlation analysis

ABSTRACT In order to make the constructed investment portfolio model better adapt to the actual securities market, this paper incorporates the multifractal correlations into the portfolio model of multi-risk assets optimization. On the basis of using variable detrended covariance to measure multifractal correlations, the variable detrended covariance is embedded into the reward-risk criterion, the mean multifractal detrended cross correlation analysis portfolio (M-D) model of multi-risk assets is constructed, and the analytical solution of the M-D model of multi-risk assets is given. The empirical analysis shows that the M-D model not only can improve investment performance but also meet the return-risk criterion much more, reaching the goal of optimizing the multi-risk asset portfolio model.

Risk spillovers and optimal hedging in commodity ETFs: A TVP-VAR Approach

Despite the growing popularity of commodity exchange traded funds (ETFs), research on their risk transmission dynamics is lacking. The study employs a Time-Varying Parameter Vector Autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model to analyze volatility transmission among commodity ETFs during significant events like the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. It aims to minimize interconnectedness among ETFs to reduce associated risk using the Mean Co-skewness optimal portfolio (MCoP) technique. The findings emphasize the importance of adaptability in portfolio management and provide actionable information for investors seeking to optimize allocation and manage risk exposure effectively in dynamic market environments.

Asymmetric multi-scale systemic risk spillovers across international commodity futures markets: The role of infectious disease uncertainty

This paper investigates the role of infectious disease uncertainty on multi-scale risk spillovers and portfolio implications across 12 international commodity futures markets from January 2006 to August 2022. We use wavelet packet decomposition and a novel risk spillover network topology approach based on a smooth transition vector autoregression model. The main findings are summarized as follows. First, there is an obvious asymmetry in spillover effects, i.e., the intensity of risk spillovers increases significantly during periods of high infectious disease uncertainty, and clear evidence of time-varying total spillovers across various regimes and frequencies. Second, cross-category risk spillovers are more pronounced in high-uncertainty regimes, while risk networks tend to cluster within the same category during low-uncertainty regimes. Third, the role of commodity futures in the risk spillover networks varies across different time scales and regimes, with gold consistently acting as a stable net risk transmitter. We also develop optimal portfolio strategies across commodity futures markets at different time scales and regimes based on the risk spillover analysis.

An adapted Black Widow Optimization Algorithm for Financial Portfolio Optimization Problem with cardinalty and budget constraints

Financial Portfolio Optimization Problem (FPOP) is a cornerstone in quantitative investing and financial engineering, focusing on optimizing assets allocation to balance risk and expected return, a concept evolving since Harry Markowitz’s 1952 Mean-Variance model. This paper introduces a novel meta-heuristic approach based on the Black Widow Algorithm for Portfolio Optimization (BWAPO) to solve the FPOP. The new method addresses three versions of the portfolio optimization problems: the unconstrained version, the equality cardinality-constrained version, and the inequality cardinality-constrained version. New features are introduced for the BWAPO to adapt better to the problem, including (1) mating attraction and (2) differential evolution mutation strategy. The proposed BWAPO is evaluated against other metaheuristic approaches used in portfolio optimization from literature, and its performance demonstrates its effectiveness through comparative studies on benchmark datasets using multiple performance metrics, particularly in the unconstrained Mean-Variance portfolio optimization version. Additionally, when encountering cardinality constraint, the proposed approach yields competitive results, especially noticeable with smaller datasets. This leads to a focused examination of the outcomes arising from equality versus inequality cardinality constraints, intending to determine which constraint type is more effective in producing portfolios with higher returns. The paper also presents a comprehensive mathematical model that integrates real-world constraints such as transaction costs, transaction lots, and a dollar-denominated budget, in addition to cardinality and bounding constraints. The model assesses both equality/inequality cardinality constraint versions of the problem, revealing that the inequality constraint tends to offer a wider range of feasible solutions with increased return potential.

An R2R approach for stock prediction and portfolio optimization

An R2R approach for stock prediction and portfolio optimization

Discrete level-bundle method for mean-CVaR portfolio optimization with cardinality constraint

Discrete level-bundle method for mean-CVaR portfolio optimization with cardinality constraint