OPTIMAL PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT WITH FIXED TRANSACTION COSTS

We study optimal portfolio management policies for an investor who must pay a transaction cost equal to a fixed Traction of his portfolio value each time he trades. We focus on the infinite horizon objective function of maximizing the asymptotic growth rate, so me optimal policies we derive approximate those of an investor with logarithmic utility at a distant horizon. When investment opportunities are modeled as "m" correlated geometric Brownian motion stocks and a riskless bond, we show that the optimal policy reduces to solving a single stopping time problem. When there is a single risky stock, we give a system of equations whose solution determines the optima! rule. We use numerical methods to solve for the optima! policy when there are two risky stocks. We study several specific examples and observe the general qualitative result that, even with very low transaction cost levels, the optimal policy entails very infrequent trading. Copyright 1995 Blackwell Publishers.