Seventy years after Markowitz, portfolio optimization is still an open problem — not because the math is unsettled, but because estimation error eats the theoretical gains. The literature here spans classical mean-variance and its regularized descendants, risk parity and volatility targeting, Black-Litterman-style view blending, and newer machine-learning approaches to covariance estimation and end-to-end allocation.
The recurring finding worth internalizing: naive equal-weight portfolios are shockingly hard to beat out of sample, so a paper’s value usually lies in how honestly it handles estimation risk — shrinkage, robust optimization, turnover penalties — rather than in the elegance of its objective function. The ranking below favors papers that test allocations on real data with realistic constraints.
Related hubs: Factor Investing & Asset Pricing, Risk Management, Machine Learning for Forecasting.
Against the backdrop of rapid technological advancement and the deepening digital economy, this study examines the causal impact of digital transformation on corporate financial asset allocation in China. Using data from A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2022, we construct a firm-level digitaliz
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for financial trading, enabling dynamic strategy optimization in complex markets. This study explores the integration of sentiment analysis, derived from large language models (LLMs), into RL frameworks to enhance trading performan
Unlike developed market, some emerging markets are dominated by retail and unprofessional trading. China A share market is a good and fitting example in last 20 years. Meanwhile, lots of research show professional investor in China A share market continuously generate excess return compare with tota
We develop \emph{Topological Risk Parity} (TRP), a tree-based portfolio construction approach intended for long/short, market neutral, factor-aware portfolios. The method is motivated by the dominance of passive/factor flows that naturally create a tree-like structure in markets. We introduce two im
Portfolio Management is the process of overseeing a group of investments, referred to as a portfolio, with the objective of achieving predetermined investment goals. Portfolio optimization is a key component that involves allocating the portfolio assets so as to maximize returns while minimizing ris
Capital allocation is a procedure used to assess the risk contributions of individual risk components to the total risk of a portfolio. While the conditional tail expectation (CTE)-based capital allocation is arguably the most popular capital allocation method, its inability to reflect important tai
Recently, reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable results in various domains, including robotics, games, natural language processing, and finance. In the financial domain, this approach has been applied to tasks such as portfolio optimization, where an agent continuously adjusts the allocatio
In this study, MLP models with dynamic structure are applied to factor models for asset pricing tasks. Concretely, the MLP pyramid model structure was employed on firm-characteristic-sorted portfolio factors for modelling the large-capital US stocks. It was further developed as a practicable factor
We consider the portfolio optimisation problem where the terminal function is an S-shaped utility applied at the difference between the wealth and a random benchmark process. We develop several numerical methods for solving the problem using deep learning and duality methods. We use deep learning me
Large language models (LLMs) and their fine-tuning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in various language understanding and generation tasks. This paper explores fine-tuning LLMs for stock return forecasting with financial newsflow. In quantitative investing, return forecasting is fun
In this work, we present an alternative passive investment strategy. The passive investment philosophy comes from the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), and its adoption is widespread. If EMH is true, one cannot outperform market by actively managing their portfolio for a long time. Also, it require
The Cover universal portfolio (UP from now on) has many interesting theoretical and numerical properties and was investigated for a long time. Building on it, we explore what happens when we add this UP to the market as a new synthetic asset and construct by recurrence higher order UPs. We investiga
The problem of asset liability management (ALM) is a classic problem of the financial mathematics and of great interest for the banking institutions and insurance companies. Several formulations of this problem under various model settings have been studied under the Mean-Variance (MV) principle per
In this paper, we explore potential uses of generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, for investment portfolio selection. Trusting investment advice from Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) models is a challenge due to model “hallucinations”, necessitating careful verification and validation of th
The financial industry should be involved in mitigating the risk of downturns in the financial wellbeing indices around the world by implementing well-developed financial tools such as insurance instruments on the underlying wellbeing indices. We define a new quantitative measure of the wellbeing of
A trillion-dollar industry is based on investing in or benchmarking to capitalization-weighted indexes, even though the finance literature rejects the mean-vari
Drifts of asset returns are notoriously difficult to model accurately and, yet, trading strategies obtained from portfolio optimization are very sensitive to them. To mitigate this well-known phenomenon we study robust growth-optimization in a high-dimensional incomplete market under drift uncertain
Signal correlation and PnL correlation are correlations over different index sets - across assets at each date versus across dates for scalar payoffs - and practitioners often treat the first as a proxy for the second. We give an exact decomposition that shows what that proxy sees and what it discar
This paper is concerned with Merton’s portfolio optimization problem in a Volterra stochastic environment described by a multivariate fake stationary Volterra–Heston model. Due to the non-Markovianity and non-semimartingality of the underlying processes, the classical stochastic control approach ca
Cyber risk has become a critical financial threat in today’s interconnected digital economy. This paper introduces a cyber-risk management framework for networked digital systems that combines the strategic behavior of players with contagion dynamics within a security game. We address the problem of
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