RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Risk Parity, Maximum Diversification,
and Minimum Variance: An Analytic Perspective
JF The Journal of Portfolio Management
FD Institutional Investor Journals
SP 39
OP 53
DO 10.3905/jpm.2013.39.3.039
VO 39
IS 3
A1 Roger Clarke
A1 Harindra de Silva
A1 Steven Thorley
YR 2013
UL https://pm-research.com/content/39/3/39.abstract
AB Analytic solutions to risk parity, maximum diversification, and minimum variance portfolios provide useful perspectives about their construction and composition. Individual asset weights depend on both systematic and idiosyncratic risk in all three risk-based portfolios, but systematic risk eliminates many investable assets in long-only, constrained, maximum-diversification, and minimum-variance portfolios. On the other hand, risk-parity portfolios include all investable assets, and idiosyncratic risk has little effect on weight magnitude. The algebraic forms for optimal asset weights derived in this article yield generalizable properties of risk-based portfolios, in contrast to empirical simulations that employ a specific set of historical returns, proprietary risk models, and multiple constraints. These analytic solutions reveal precisely how various kinds of predicted risk affect the relative magnitude of security weights in each type of risk-based portfolio construction.TOPICS: Portfolio construction, portfolio theory, volatility measures