How many stocks are required to reduce unsystematic risk significantly is an important question for investors. While there is a large body of research on the subject in the United States, there is little formal work on this question in India. We show that a 15-20 stock portfolio, the traditional...

Recent research shows superior performance of equity mutual funds which differ the most from their benchmarks. However, existing studies have not examined important questions about risk, such as the impact of holding a portfolio of low R2 funds on the reduction in portfolio risk achieved through...

This study contributes new empirical evidence on the profitability of a momentum strategy in the Philippines equity market. The study was conducted over the time period January 2000 to June 2012. We evaluated a momentum strategy based only on past return information as well as a strategy that...

This paper develops a new methodology for simulating fixed-income return distributions. It is shown that a traditional factor risk model, when augmented with reference returns, is capable of generating visually consistent return distributions for a broad range of fixed income instruments such as...

Investors have traditionally relied on mean-variance analysis to determine a portfolio’s optimal asset mix, but they have struggled to incorporate private equity into this framework because they do not know how to estimate its risk. The observed volatility of private equity returns is...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

We provide a Matlab quadratic optimization tool based on Markowitz's critical line algorithm that significantly outperforms standard software packages and a recently developed operations research algorithm. As an illustration: For a 2000 asset universe our method needs less than a second to...

Several attempts have been made to reduce the impact of estimation errors on the optimal portfolio composition. On the one hand, improved estimators of the necessary moments have been developed and on the other hand, heuristic methods have been generated to enhance the portfolio performance, for...

This paper proposes a novel scheme for achieving high investment performances with Mean-Variance (MV) portfolios. As is well-known, MV portfolio performances largely depend on the quality of estimates of parameters, namely expected returns and covariance matrices. Particularly, easily...