We investigate the out-of-sample diversification benefits of risk parity portfolios by analyzing the properties an asset class has to fulfill in order to be beneficial in a risk parity strategy and compare them with benefits present in other heuristic weighting techniques, especially risk-based...

Academic and practitioner research has presented strong evidence in support of the addition of commodity futures contracts to a diversified stock portfolio to enhance the risk-return characteristics of the portfolio. Moreover, it is well documented that diversification among risky assets in a...

Increasing correlation among international equity markets has prompted investors to seek new investment opportunities. To shed light on this issue for U.S. investors, this paper measures economic benefits of international equity diversification using mean-variance and higher-moments frameworks...

The Black-Litterman model aims to enhance asset allocation decisions by overcoming the problems of mean-variance portfolio optimization. We propose a sample based version of the Black-Litterman model and implement it on a multi-asset portfolio consisting of global stocks, bonds, and commodity...

This paper analyzes the performance of index-based portfolios across developed, emerging, and frontier markets. Besides considering stocks and bonds for portfolio construction, we investigate how investment opportunity sets are enlarged when credit default swaps (CDSs) are added into portfolios...

Optimization of international securitized real estate portfolios has been a key topic for several decades. However, most previous analysis has focused on regional diversification by applying the traditional mean-variance (MV) framework suggested by Markowitz (1952) even if the limitations of...

Diversification is a fundamental topic for all investors but there remains little agreement on how to measure it. Often it is defined ambiguously through risk-based portfolio construction techniques. Recently it has been suggested to connect maximising diversification with minimising risk...

We consider an investor who faces parameter uncertainty in a continuous-time financial market. We model the investor's preference by a power utility function leading to constant relative risk aversion. We show that the loss in expected utility is large when using a simple plug-in strategy for...

Over the past decade, investors and financial advisors have shown renewed interest in increasing international equity exposure. Investors confront one of two key issues in making decisions on their strategic allocations, depending on the starting point of their portfolios: 1) for a U.S.-only...

We introduce a new framework for understanding portfolio diversification that provides a coherent basis for comparing methodologies and offers a new approach to portfolio construction. The primary argument is that measures of diversification based only on a covariance matrix are ambiguous...