On the robustness of risk-based asset allocations

Thorsten Poddig () and Albina Unger ()

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, 2012, vol. 26, issue 3, 369-401

Abstract: Since the subprime crisis, portfolios based on risk diversification are of great interest to both academic researchers and market practitioners. They have also been employed by several asset management firms and their performance appears promising. Since they do not rely on estimates of expected returns, they are assumed to be robust. The same argument holds for minimum variance and equally weighted portfolios. In this paper, we consider a Monte Carlo simulation, as well as an empirical global portfolio dataset, to study the effect of estimation errors on the outcomes of two recently proposed asset allocations, the equally weighted risk contribution (ERC) and the principal component analysis (PCA) portfolio. The ERC portfolio is more robust to changes in the input parameters and has a smaller estimation error than the Markowitz approaches, whereas the PCA portfolio is even more unstable than the classical approaches. In the worst-case scenario, neither approach delivers what it promises. However, in every case the resulting return–risk relationship is dominated by the Markowitz approaches. Copyright Swiss Society for Financial Market Research 2012

Keywords: Asset allocation; Risk contributions; Minimum variance; Portfolio diversification; Principal component portfolios; Maximum entropy; Naive portfolios; Estimation error; C13; C15; C61; G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11408-012-0190-5

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