Quantitative Finance

We study a discrete-time portfolio selection problem with partial information and maxi\-mum drawdown constraint. Drift uncertainty in the multidimensional framework is modeled by a prior probability distribution. In this Bayesian framework, we derive the dynamic programming equation using an appropriate change of measure, and obtain semi-explicit results in the Gaussian case. The latter case, with a CRRA utility function is completely solved numerically using recent deep learning techniques for stochastic optimal control problems. We emphasize the informative value of the learning strategy versus the non-learning one by providing empirical performance and sensitivity analysis with respect to the uncertainty of the drift. Furthermore, we show numerical evidence of the close relationship between the non-learning strategy and a no short-sale constrained Merton problem, by illustrating the convergence of the former towards the latter as the maximum drawdown constraint vanishes.

This paper expands the notion of robust profit opportunities in financial markets to incorporate distributional uncertainty using Wasserstein distance as the ambiguity measure. Financial markets with risky and risk-free assets are considered. The infinite dimensional primal problems are formulated, leading to their simpler finite dimensional dual problems. A principal motivating question is how does distributional uncertainty help or hurt the robustness of the profit opportunity. Towards answering this question, some theory is developed and computational experiments are conducted. Finally some open questions and suggestions for future research are discussed.

It has been widely observed that capitalization-weighted indexes can be beaten by surprisingly simple, systematic investment strategies. Indeed, in the U.S. stock market, equal-weighted portfolios, random-weighted portfolios, and other naive, non- optimized portfolios tend to outperform a capitalization-weighted index over the long term. This outperformance is generally attributed to beneficial factor exposures. Here, we provide a deeper, more general explanation of this phenomenon by decomposing portfolio log-returns into an average growth and an excess growth component. Using a rank-based empirical study we argue that the excess growth component plays the major role in explaining the outperformance of naive portfolios. In particular, individual stock growth rates are not as critical as is traditionally assumed.

Energy markets are strategic to governments and economic development. Several commodities compete as substitutable energy sources and energy diversifiers. Such competition reduces the energy vulnerability of countries as well as portfolios' risk exposure. Vulnerability results mainly from price trends and fluctuations, following supply and demand shocks. Such energy price uncertainty attracts many market participants in the energy commodity markets. First, energy producers and consumers hedge adverse price changes with energy derivatives. Second, financial market participants use commodities and commodity derivatives to diversify their conventional portfolios. For that reason, we consider the joint dependence between the United States (U.S.) natural gas, crude oil and stock markets. We use Gatfaoui's (2015) time varying multivariate copula analysis and related variance regimes. Such approach handles structural changes in asset prices. In this light, we draw implications for portfolio optimization, when investors diversify their stock portfolios with natural gas and crude oil assets. We minimize the portfolio's variance, semi-variance and tail risk, in the presence and the absence of constraints on the portfolio's expected return and/or U.S. stock investment. The return constraint reduces the performance of the optimal portfolio. Moreover, the regime-specific portfolio optimization helps implement an enhanced active management strategy over the whole sample period. Under a return constraint, the semi-variance optimal portfolio offers the best risk-return tradeoff, whereas the tail-risk optimal portfolio offers the best tradeoff in the absence of a return constraint.

We address the problem of partial index tracking, replicating a benchmark index using a small number of assets. Accurate tracking with a sparse portfolio is extensively studied as a classic finance problem. However in practice, a tracking portfolio must also be diverse in order to minimise risk -- a requirement which has only been dealt with by ad-hoc methods before. We introduce the first index tracking method that explicitly optimises both diversity and sparsity in a single joint framework. Diversity is realised by a regulariser based on pairwise similarity of assets, and we demonstrate that learning similarity from data can outperform some existing heuristics. Finally, we show that the way we model diversity leads to an easy solution for sparsity, allowing both constraints to be optimised easily and efficiently. we run out-of-sample backtesting for a long interval of 15 years (2003 -- 2018), and the results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Maximum drawdown, the largest cumulative loss from peak to trough, is one of the most widely used indicators of risk in the fund management industry, but one of the least developed in the context of measures of risk. We formalize drawdown risk as Conditional Expected Drawdown (CED), which is the tail mean of maximum drawdown distributions. We show that CED is a degree one positive homogenous risk measure, so that it can be linearly attributed to factors; and convex, so that it can be used in quantitative optimization. We empirically explore the differences in risk attributions based on CED, Expected Shortfall (ES) and volatility. An important feature of CED is its sensitivity to serial correlation. In an empirical study that fits AR(1) models to US Equity and US Bonds, we find substantially higher correlation between the autoregressive parameter and CED than with ES or with volatility.

We give a definitive treatment of duality for optimal consumption over the infinite horizon, in a semimartingale incomplete market satisfying no unbounded profit with bounded risk (NUPBR). Rather than base the dual domain on (local) martingale deflators, we use a class of supermartingale deflators such that deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption is a supermartingale for all admissible consumption plans. This yields a strong duality, because the enlarged dual domain of processes dominated by deflators is naturally closed, without invoking its closure. In this way we automatically reach the bipolar of the set of deflators. We complete this picture by proving that the set of processes dominated by local martingale deflators is dense in our dual domain, confirming that we have identified the natural dual space. In addition to the optimal consumption and deflator, we characterise the optimal wealth process. At the optimum, deflated wealth is a supermartingale and a potential, while deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption is a uniformly integrable martingale. This is the natural generalisation of the corresponding feature in the terminal wealth problem, where deflated wealth at the optimum is a uniformly integrable martingale. We use no constructions involving equivalent local martingale measures. This is natural, given that such measures typically do not exist over the infinite horizon and that we are working under NUPBR, which does not require their existence. The structure of the duality proof reveals an interesting feature compared with the terminal wealth problem. There, the dual domain is L 1 -bounded, but here the primal domain has this property, and hence many steps in the duality proof show a marked reversal of roles for the primal and dual domains, compared with the proofs of Kramkov and Schachermayer.

In this work, we consider the optimal portfolio selection problem under hard constraints on trading volume amounts when the dynamics of the risky asset returns are governed by a discrete-time approximation of the Markov-modulated geometric Brownian motion. The states of Markov chain are interpreted as the states of an economy. The problem is stated as a dynamic tracking problem of a reference portfolio with desired return. We propose to use the model predictive control (MPC) methodology in order to obtain feedback trading strategies. Our approach is tested on a set of a real data from the radically different financial markets: the Russian Stock Exchange MICEX, the New York Stock Exchange and the Foreign Exchange Market (FOREX).

Instead of controlling "symmetric" risks measured by central moments of investment return or terminal wealth, more and more portfolio models have shifted their focus to manage "asymmetric" downside risks that the investment return is below certain threshold. Among the existing downside risk measures, the lower-partial moments (LPM) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) are probably most promising. In this paper we investigate the dynamic mean-LPM and mean-CVaR portfolio optimization problems in continuous-time, while the current literature has only witnessed their static versions. Our contributions are two-fold, in both building up tractable formulations and deriving corresponding analytical solutions. By imposing a limit funding level on the terminal wealth, we conquer the ill-posedness exhibited in the class of mean-downside risk portfolio models. The limit funding level not only enables us to solve both dynamic mean-LPM and mean-CVaR portfolio optimization problems, but also offers a flexibility to tame the aggressiveness of the portfolio policies generated from such mean - downside risk models. More specifically, for a general market setting, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Lagrangian multiplies, which is a key step in applying the martingale approach, and establish a theoretical foundation for developing efficient numerical solution approaches. Moreover, for situations where the opportunity set of the market setting is deterministic, we derive analytical portfolio policies for both dynamic mean-LPM and mean-CVaR formulations.

The portfolio optimisation problem, first raised by Harry Markowitz in 1952, has been a fundamental and central topic to understanding the stock market and making decisions. There has been plenty of works contributing to development of the mean-variance optimisation (MVO) so far. In this paper, one kind of them, namely, dynamic mean-variance optimisation (DMVO) is mainly discussed. One can apply either precommitment or game-theoritical approach to address time-inconsistency in DMVO. We use the second approach to seek for a time-consistent strategy. After obtaining the optimal strategy, we extend the result to a CEV-driven economy. In order to prove the usefulness of them, strategies are fit into both real market data and simulated data. It turns out that the strategy whose assumptions are close to market conditions generally gives a better result. Lastly, a selected strategy is chosen to compare with another strategy came up by deep learning technique.