Multi-period portfolio optimization with investor views under regime switching

We propose a novel multi-period trading model that allows portfolio managers to perform optimal portfolio allocation while incorporating their interpretable investment views. This model’s significant advantage is its intuitive and reactive design that incorporates the latest asset return regimes to quantitatively solve managers’ question: how certain should one be that a given investment view is occurring? First, we describe a framework for multi-period portfolio allocation formulated as a convex optimization problem that trades off expected return, risk and transaction costs. Using a framework borrowed from model predictive control introduced by Boyd et al., we employ optimization to plan a sequence of trades using forecasts of future quantities, only the first set being executed. Multi-period trading lends itself to dynamic readjustment of the portfolio when gaining new information. Second, we use the Black-Litterman model to combine investment views specified in a simple linear combination based format with the market portfolio. A data-driven method to adjust the confidence in the manager’s views by comparing them to dynamically updated regime-switching forecasts is proposed. Our contribution is to incorporate both multi-period trading and interpretable investment views into one framework and offer a novel method of using regime-switching to determine each view’s confidence. This method replaces portfolio managers’ need to provide estimated confidence levels for their views, substituting them with a dynamic quantitative approach. The framework is reactive, tractable and tested on 15 years of daily historical data. In a numerical example, this method’s benefits are found to deliver higher excess returns for the same degree of risk in both the case when an investment view proves to be correct, but, more notably, also the case when a view proves to be incorrect. To facilitate ease of use and future research, we also developed an open-source software library that replicates our results.