Using the S&P GSCI and its five component sub-indices, we show that considering each commodity separately yields nontrivial hedging gains in and out of sample. During 1999-2019, the maximum Sharpe ratio portfolio assigns positive weights to the GSCI Energy, Industrial and Precious Metals,...

We test the out-of-sample trading performance of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) agents and compare them with the performance of equally-weighted portfolios and traditional mean-variance (MV) optimization benchmarks. By dividing European and U.S. indices constituents into factor datasets,...

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...

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...

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 conditional heteroskedasticity in large universes. Conversely,...

Many econometric and data-science applications require a reliable estimate of the covariance matrix, such as Markowitz portfolio selection. When the number of variables is of the same magnitude as the number of observations, this constitutes a difficult estimation problem; the sample covariance...

Two basic solutions have been proposed to fix the well-documented incompatibility of the sample covariance matrix with Markowitz mean-variance portfolio optimization: first, restrict leverage so much that no short sales are allowed; or, second, linearly shrink the sample covariance matrix towards...

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...

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...