Regularized Maximum Diversification Investment Strategy

Abstract

The maximum diversification has been shown in the literature to depend on the vector of asset volatilities and the inverse of the covariance matrix of the asset return covariance matrix. In practice, these two quantities need to be replaced by their sample statistics. The estimation error associated with the use of these sample statistics may be amplified due to (near) singularity of the covariance matrix, in financial markets with many assets. This, in turn, may lead to the selection of portfolios that are far from the optimal regarding standard portfolio performance measures of the financial market. To address this problem, we investigate three regularization techniques, including the ridge, the spectral cut-off, and the Landweber–Fridman approaches in order to stabilize the inverse of the covariance matrix. These regularization schemes involve a tuning parameter that needs to be chosen. In light of this fact, we propose a data-driven method for selecting the tuning parameter. We show that the selected portfolio by regularization is asymptotically efficient with respect to the diversification ratio. In empirical and Monte Carlo experiments, the resulting regularized rules are compared to several strategies, such as the most diversified portfolio, the target portfolio, the global minimum variance portfolio, and the naive 1/N strategy in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample Sharpe ratio performance, and it is shown that our method yields significant Sharpe ratio improvements.

A Comparison of Emerging and Developed Economy Portfolio Performance Under COVID-19

“…The diversification ratio of a portfolio is the measure of diversification that is gained from holding securities that do not have a perfect correlation and, intuitively, portfolios that consist of securities with high correlation figures will not be well diversified and possess a very low diversification ratio (Kone, 2021).…”