Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock...

Modeling and forecasting dynamic (or time-varying) covariance matrices has many important applications in finance, such as Markowitz portfolio selection. A popular tool to this end are multivariate GARCH models. Historically, such models did not perform well in large dimensions due to the...

Markowitz (1952) portfolio selection requires an estimator of the covariance matrix of returns. To address this problem, we promote a nonlinear shrinkage estimator that is more flexible than previous linear shrinkage estimators and has just the right number of free parameters (that is, the...

Multivariate GARCH models do not perform well in large dimensions due to the so-called curse of dimensionality. The recent DCC-NL model of Engle et al. (2019) is able to overcome this curse via nonlinear shrinkage estimation of the unconditional correlation matrix. In this paper, we show how...

This paper establishes the first analytical formula for optimal nonlinear shrinkage of large-dimensional covariance matrices. We achieve this by identifying and mathematically exploiting a deep connection between nonlinear shrinkage and nonparametric estimation of the Hilbert transform of the...

Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock...

Markowitz (1952) portfolio selection requires an estimator of the covariance matrix of returns. To address this problem, we promote a nonlinear shrinkage estimator that is more flexible than previous linear shrinkage estimators and has just the right number of free parameters (that is, the...

Second moments of asset returns are important for risk management and portfolio selection. The problem of estimating second moments can be approached from two angles: time series and the cross-section. In time series, the key is to account for conditional heteroskedasticity; a favored model is...

This paper injects factor structure into the estimation of time-varying, large-dimensional covariance matrices of stock returns. Existing factor models struggle to model the covariance matrix of residuals in the presence of time-varying conditional heteroskedasticity in large universes....

Markowitz portfolio selection is a cornerstone in finance, in academia as well as in the industry. Most academic studies either ignore transaction costs or account for them in a way that is both unrealistic and suboptimal by (i) assuming transaction costs to be constant across stocks and (ii)...