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In this thesis we explicitly solve several portfolio optimization problems in a very realistic setting. The fundamental assumptions on the market setting are motivated by practical experience and the resulting optimal strategies are challenged in numerical simulations.
We consider an investor who wants to maximize expected utility of terminal wealth by trading in a high-dimensional financial market with one riskless asset and several stocks.
The stock returns are driven by a Brownian motion and their drift is modelled by a Gaussian random variable. We consider a partial information setting, where the drift is unknown to the investor and has to be estimated from the observable stock prices in addition to some analyst’s opinion as proposed in [CLMZ06]. The best estimate given these observations is the well known Kalman-Bucy-Filter. We then consider an innovations process to transform the partial information setting into a market with complete information and an observable Gaussian drift process.
The investor is restricted to portfolio strategies satisfying several convex constraints.
These constraints can be due to legal restrictions, due to fund design or due to client's specifications. We cover in particular no-short-selling and no-borrowing constraints.
One popular approach to constrained portfolio optimization is the convex duality approach of Cvitanic and Karatzas. In [CK92] they introduce auxiliary stock markets with shifted market parameters and obtain a dual problem to the original portfolio optimization problem that can be better solvable than the primal problem.
Hence we consider this duality approach and using stochastic control methods we first solve the dual problems in the cases of logarithmic and power utility.
Here we apply a reverse separation approach in order to obtain areas where the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman differential equation can be solved. It turns out that these areas have a straightforward interpretation in terms of the resulting portfolio strategy. The areas differ between active and passive stocks, where active stocks are invested in, while passive stocks are not.
Afterwards we solve the auxiliary market given the optimal dual processes in a more general setting, allowing for various market settings and various dual processes.
We obtain explicit analytical formulas for the optimal portfolio policies and provide an algorithm that determines the correct formula for the optimal strategy in any case.
We also show optimality of our resulting portfolio strategies in different verification theorems.
Subsequently we challenge our theoretical results in a historical and an artificial simulation that are even closer to the real world market than the setting we used to derive our theoretical results. However, we still obtain compelling results indicating that our optimal strategies can outperform any benchmark in a real market in general.