IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/fmktpm/v29y2015i3p251-269.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do not put all your eggs in one (time) basket

Author

Listed:
  • Zvika Afik

Abstract

We show that it is easy to enhance an investment’s Sharpe ratio at no additional cost by purchasing the risky asset in a few installments instead of all at once. A similar argument holds for selling the risky asset. In the simple case of a geometrical Brownian motion (GBM), we prove analytically that such a strategy decreases the variance of returns without changing the expected returns, relative to the one-shot strategy. We demonstrate the benefits of this strategy by bootstrapping daily S&P-500 prices for the 1985–2013 period and using Monte Carlo simulations of GBM and jump-diffusion processes. The results are statistically significant. We show that the strategy is more effective for short investment horizons and that performance improves with the number of installments used. Copyright Swiss Society for Financial Market Research 2015

Suggested Citation

  • Zvika Afik, 2015. "Do not put all your eggs in one (time) basket," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 29(3), pages 251-269, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:fmktpm:v:29:y:2015:i:3:p:251-269
    DOI: 10.1007/s11408-015-0252-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11408-015-0252-6
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11408-015-0252-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Leggio, Karyl B. & Lien, Donald, 2001. "Does loss aversion explain dollar-cost averaging?," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 10(1-4), pages 117-127.
    2. Javier Estrada, 2006. "Downside Risk in Practice," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 18(1), pages 117-125, March.
    3. Black, Fischer & Scholes, Myron S, 1973. "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 637-654, May-June.
    4. Knight, John R. & Mandell, Lewis, 1992. "Nobody gains from dollar cost averaging analytical, numerical and empirical results," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 51-61.
    5. Samuelson, Paul A., 1967. "General Proof that Diversification Pays*," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 1-13, March.
    6. Merton, Robert C., 1972. "An Analytic Derivation of the Efficient Portfolio Frontier," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 7(4), pages 1851-1872, September.
    7. Samuelson, Paul A, 1997. "Proof by Certainty Equivalents that Diversification-across-Time Does Worse, Risk Corrected, Than Diversification-throughout-Time," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 129-142, March.
    8. Constantinides, George M., 1979. "A Note on the Suboptimality of Dollar-Cost Averaging as an Investment Policy," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 443-450, June.
    9. Chacko, George & Viceira, Luis M., 2003. "Spectral GMM estimation of continuous-time processes," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1-2), pages 259-292.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karyl Leggio & Donald Lien, 2003. "An empirical examination of the effectiveness of dollar-cost averaging using downside risk performance measures," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 27(2), pages 211-223, June.
    2. Michele Bisceglia & Paola Zola, 2018. "Dollar-Cost Averaging with Yearly and Biyearly Installments," Journal of Applied Management and Investments, Department of Business Administration and Corporate Security, International Humanitarian University, vol. 7(1), pages 1-14, February.
    3. Kirkby, J. Lars & Mitra, Sovan & Nguyen, Duy, 2020. "An analysis of dollar cost averaging and market timing investment strategies," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 286(3), pages 1168-1186.
    4. Min Dai & Zuo Quan Xu & Xun Yu Zhou, 2009. "Continuous-Time Markowitz's Model with Transaction Costs," Papers 0906.0678, arXiv.org.
    5. Guégan, Dominique & Ielpo, Florian & Lalaharison, Hanjarivo, 2013. "Option pricing with discrete time jump processes," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 2417-2445.
    6. Xuejun Jin & Hongze Li & Bin Yu, 2023. "The day‐of‐the‐month effect and the performance of the dollar cost averaging strategy: Evidence from China," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 63(S1), pages 797-815, April.
    7. Scheuenstuhl, Gerhard & Zagst, Rudi, 2008. "Integrated portfolio management with options," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 185(3), pages 1477-1500, March.
    8. Christoffersen, Peter & Jacobs, Kris & Ornthanalai, Chayawat & Wang, Yintian, 2008. "Option valuation with long-run and short-run volatility components," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(3), pages 272-297, December.
    9. Kristensen, Dennis, 2008. "Estimation of partial differential equations with applications in finance," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 144(2), pages 392-408, June.
    10. Gaydon, D.S. & Meinke, H. & Rodriguez, D. & McGrath, D.J., 2012. "Comparing water options for irrigation farmers using Modern Portfolio Theory," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 1-9.
    11. Lin, Zhongguo & Han, Liyan & Li, Wei, 2021. "Option replication with transaction cost under Knightian uncertainty," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 567(C).
    12. David S. Jones & V. Vance Roley, 1981. "Bliss Points in Mean-Variance Portfolio Models," NBER Technical Working Papers 0019, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Levy, Moshe, 2022. "An inter-temporal CAPM based on First order Stochastic Dominance," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 298(2), pages 734-739.
    14. Mr. Noureddine Krichene, 2006. "Recent Dynamics of Crude Oil Prices," IMF Working Papers 2006/299, International Monetary Fund.
    15. Peter Carr & Jian Sun, 2007. "A new approach for option pricing under stochastic volatility," Review of Derivatives Research, Springer, vol. 10(2), pages 87-150, May.
    16. Cai, Lili & Swanson, Norman R., 2011. "In- and out-of-sample specification analysis of spot rate models: Further evidence for the period 1982-2008," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 743-764, September.
    17. Chernov, Mikhail & Ronald Gallant, A. & Ghysels, Eric & Tauchen, George, 2003. "Alternative models for stock price dynamics," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1-2), pages 225-257.
    18. Dominique Guegan & Florian Ielpo & Hanjarivo Lalaharison, 2012. "Option pricing with discrete time jump processes," Post-Print halshs-00611706, HAL.
    19. Merton, Robert, 1990. "Capital market theory and the pricing of financial securities," Handbook of Monetary Economics, in: B. M. Friedman & F. H. Hahn (ed.), Handbook of Monetary Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 11, pages 497-581, Elsevier.
    20. Thuy Thi Thu Truong & Jungmu Kim, 2019. "Premiums for Non-Sustainable and Sustainable Components of Market Volatility: Evidence from the Korean Stock Market," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(18), pages 1-15, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Investment; Diversification; Monte Carlo; Sharpe ratio; G11; C15;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • C15 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Statistical Simulation Methods: General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:fmktpm:v:29:y:2015:i:3:p:251-269. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.