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Active portfolio management with benchmarking: A frontier based on alpha

Gordon Alexander and Alexandre Baptista ()

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2010, vol. 34, issue 9, 2185-2197

Abstract: Active portfolio management often involves the objective of selecting a portfolio with minimum tracking error variance (TEV) for some expected gain in return over a benchmark. However, Roll (1992) shows that such portfolios are generally suboptimal because they do not belong to the mean-variance frontier and are thus overly risky. Our paper proposes an appealing method to lessen this suboptimality that involves the objective of selecting a portfolio from the set of portfolios that have minimum TEV for various levels of ex-ante alpha, which we refer to as the alpha-TEV frontier. Since practitioners commonly use ex-post alpha to assess the performance of managers, the use of this frontier aligns the objectives of managers with how their performance is evaluated. Furthermore, sensible choices of ex-ante alpha lead to the selection of portfolios that are less risky (in variance terms) than the portfolios that active managers would otherwise select.

Keywords: Active; portfolio; management; Benchmarking; Alpha; Tracking; error; Risk; management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

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