Multiple Risky Assets, Transaction Costs and Return Predictability

Multiple Risky Assets, Transaction Costs and Return Predictability
Author: Anthony W. Lynch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN:

Our paper contributes to the dynamic portfolio choice and transaction cost literatures by considering a multiperiod CRRA individual who faces transaction costs and who has access to multiple risky assets, all with predictable returns. We numerically solve the individual's multiperiod problem in the presence of transaction costs and predictability. In particular, we characterize the investor's optimal portfolio choice with proportional and fixed transaction costs, and with return predictability similar to that observed for the U.S. stock market. We also perform some comparative statics to better understand the nature of the no-trade region with more than one risky asset. Throughout our focus is on the case with two risky assets. We also perform some utility comparisons. The calibration exercise reveals some interesting results about the relative attractiveness of the three equity portfolios calibrated.

Dynamic Asset Allocation with Predictable Returns and Transaction Costs

Dynamic Asset Allocation with Predictable Returns and Transaction Costs
Author: Pierre Collin-Dufresne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

We propose a simple approach to dynamic multi-period portfolio choice with transaction costs that is tractable in settings with a large number of securities, realistic return dynamics with multiple risk factors, many predictor variables, and stochastic volatility. We obtain a closed-form solution for an optimal trading rule when the problem is restricted to a broad class of strategies we define as 'linearity generating strategies' (LGS). When restricted to this class, the non-linear dynamic optimization problem reduces to a deterministic linear-quadratic optimization problem in the parameters of the trading strategies. We show that the LGS approach dominates several alternatives in realistic settings, and in particular when the covariance structure and transaction costs are stochastic.

Dynamic Portfolio Choice with Linear Rebalancing Rules

Dynamic Portfolio Choice with Linear Rebalancing Rules
Author: Ciamac C. Moallemi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

We consider a broad class of dynamic portfolio optimization problems that allow for complex models of return predictability, transaction costs, trading constraints, and risk considerations. Determining an optimal policy in this general setting is almost always intractable. We propose a class of linear rebalancing rules, and describe an efficient computational procedure to optimize with this class. We illustrate this method in the context of portfolio execution, and show that it achieves near optimal performance. We consider another numerical example involving dynamic trading with mean-variance preferences and demonstrate that our method can result in economically large benefits.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Dynamic Asymmetric Correlations and Transaction Constraints

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Dynamic Asymmetric Correlations and Transaction Constraints
Author: Letian Ding
Publisher:
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper develops a framework for constructing portfolios with superior out-of-sample performance in the presence of estimation errors. Our framework relies on solving the classical mean-variance problem with dynamic portfolio rebalancing at a comparatively-high frequency level. With the employment of A-DCC GARCH model, we found that the usage of turnover constraints will tend to enhance the performance of the portfolios sufficiently high to overcome transaction costs in practice. For a long-only optimal portfolio based on a linear combination of two different strategies we find a return exceeding 51% per annual with annual volatility equal to 35% over the 1998-2007 period. We argue that the advantage of our framework comes from the mean-reverting nature of the stock market and the impact of the estimation errors in high frequency level. Our works indicate that one can successfully move from ordinary monthly or weekly adjusting strategies to high frequency and dynamic asset management without the significant increase of transaction costs.

Explaining the Magnitude of Liquidity Premia

Explaining the Magnitude of Liquidity Premia
Author: Anthony W. Lynch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 51
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

The seminal work of Constantinides (1986) documents how, when the risky return is calibrated to the U.S. market return, the impact of transaction costs on per-annum liquidity premia is an order of magnitude smaller than the cost rate itself. A number of recent papers have formed portfolios sorted on liquidity measures and found a spread in expected per-annum return that is definitely not an order of magnitude smaller than the transaction cost spread: the expected per-annum return spread is found to be around 6-7% per annum. Our paper bridges the gap between Constantinides' theoretical result and the empirical magnitude of the liquidity premium by examining dynamic portfolio choice with transaction costs in a variety of more elaborate settings that move the problem closer to the one solved by real-world investors. In particular, we allow returns to be predictable and transaction costs to be stochastic, and we introduce wealth shocks, both stationary multiplicative and labor income. With predictable returns, we also allow the wealth shocks and transaction costs to be state dependent. We find that adding these real world complications to the canonical problem can cause transactions costs to produce per-annum liquidity premia that are no longer an order of magnitude smaller than the rate, but are instead the same order of magnitude. For example, predictable returns and i.i.d. labor income growth causes the liquidity premium for an agent with a wealth to monthly labor income ratio of 0 or 10 to be 1.68 % and 1.20 % respectively; these are 21-fold and 15-fold increases, respectively, relative to that in the standard i.i.d. return case. We conclude that the effect of proportional transaction costs on the standard consumption and portfolio allocation problem with i.i.d. returns can be materially altered by reasonable perturbations that bring the problem closer to the one investors are actually solving.

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Predictability in House Prices and Transaction Costs

Optimal Portfolio Choice with Predictability in House Prices and Transaction Costs
Author: Stefano Corradin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

We study a model of portfolio choice with housing in which house price is predictable. Housing is illiquid in that a transaction cost must be paid when the house is sold. We show that two state variables aff ect the agent's decisions: (i) the wealth-houseratio, and (ii) the time-varying mean rate of house price growth. The agent increases (decreases) his housing asset holding only when the wealth-house ratio reaches an optimal upper (lower) boundary. These boundaries are time-varying and will decrease (increase) when house prices are expected to rise (fall). Implications for portfolio rules and housing asset holding are examined. Finally, we use PSID data to test the implications of our model.

A Simulation Approach to Dynamic Portfolio Choice with an Application to Learning about Return Predictability

A Simulation Approach to Dynamic Portfolio Choice with an Application to Learning about Return Predictability
Author: Michael W. Brandt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2004
Genre: Portfolio management
ISBN:

"We present a simulation-based method for solving discrete-time portfolio choice problems involving non-standard preferences, a large number of assets with arbitrary return distribution, and, most importantly, a large number of state variables with potentially path-dependent or non-stationary dynamics. The method is flexible enough to accommodate intermediate consumption, portfolio constraints, parameter and model uncertainty, and learning. We first establish the properties of the method for the portfolio choice between a stock index and cash when the stock returns are either iid or predictable by the dividend yield. We then explore the problem of an investor who takes into account the predictability of returns but is uncertain about the parameters of the data generating process. The investor chooses the portfolio anticipating that future data realizations will contain useful information to learn about the true parameter values"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.