Portfolio Optimization And Performance Evaluation PDF Download

This thesis studies three important issues in portfolio management: the impact of estimation risk on portfolio optimization, the role of fundamental analysis in portfolio selection and the power of the bootstrap approach for separating skill from luck across a sample of portfolio managers. The first study examines the practical value of the mean-variance portfolio optimization. This issue arises from the concern that the performance of the meanvariance portfolio suffers seriously from estimation errors in input parameters. Based on simulated asset returns, we compare the performance of selected popular portfolios against the naïve equally weighted portfolio (1/N) in terms of the Sharpe Ratio. We conclude that given relatively small and persistent anomalies, some sophisticated portfolio rules can outperform the naïve one at estimation windows of reasonable lengths. We find that (1) an estimation window of 120 months is needed for the optimization-based portfolio rules to outperform the 1/N rule when annual abnormal returns lie between a certain range; (2) given the same abnormal returns, even longer estimation windows are needed when asset returns exhibit fat tails; (3) our preferred portfolio rule, which combines optimally the sample tangency portfolio with MacKinlay and Pástor's (2000) portfolio, performs well relative to other rules. Our second study examines the role of fundamental analysis in portfolio selection. Fundamental analysis assumes implicitly that asset prices mean-revert to their fundamental values. We solve the instantaneous mean-variance portfolio choice problem when asset prices mean-revert to their fundamentals and analyze how this meanreversion feature affects the performance of the optimal portfolio. Our analytical results show that the expected appraisal ratio of the optimal portfolio is increasing in the meanreversion speed for a given stationary distribution of the mispricing and it is increasing in the standard deviation of the stationary distribution for a given level of the meanreversion speed. The contribution from dividends is positive, increasing in the dividend yield and is tantamount to increasing the mean-reversion speed. Our numerical examples indicate that fundamental analysis can be more helpful than practitioners' performance shows. One implication of this is that it must be very challenging to obtain reasonable forecasts of the mispricing. Our third study provides a simulation analysis of the power of the bootstrap approach for identifying skill among a large population of mutual funds. Unlike the standard t-test, this approach does not require ex ante parametric assumption on fund alphas and allows us to infer on the existence of genuine skill across a large sample of fund managers. Its recent applications in mutual fund performance analysis have produced strikingly different findings from those documented in the classical literature. However, as far as we know, its power has not been subject to any rigorous statistical analysis. We provide a Monte Carlo simulation analysis of the validity and power of this method by applying it to evaluating the performance of hypothetical funds under varieties of parameter assumptions. We find that this method can be misleading, which is true regardless of using alpha estimates or their t-statistics. This makes the recent findings dubious. The major problem with this method lies in the inappropriate use or misinterpretation of what Fama and French (2010) call "likelihoods" in testing for difference between realized and bootstrapped alphas at selected percentiles. We also show that the variance decomposition and the Kolmogrov-Smirnov test can lead to correct inferences on fund managers' skill when likelihoods fail to do so.