IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/revfin/v21y2012i3p93-101.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

True Markowitz or assumptions we break and why it matters

Author

Listed:
  • Wilford, D. Sykes

Abstract

Markowitz (1952, 1959) underlies modern corporate finance literature, from modern portfolio theory, option theory, to risk management (especially value at risk type methodologies). From it, Diversify has entered all languages, such is its power. Terms such as “the only free lunch” have become a way to give praise to Markowitz work. And, just as with all fundamental breakthroughs in the literature it has been extended many directions, sometimes not necessarily to the benefit of the original work, which often gets blamed when one rendition or another breaks down. With almost every MBA graduated believing they know what Markowitz optimization or portfolio theory means, it behooves us to step back and look at some of the basics, the assumptions that are made, the costs of breaking assumptions, and the potential disasters that can occur when those basics behind all of the theories dependent upon Markowitz' original work are ignored.

Suggested Citation

  • Wilford, D. Sykes, 2012. "True Markowitz or assumptions we break and why it matters," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 93-101.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:revfin:v:21:y:2012:i:3:p:93-101
    DOI: 10.1016/j.rfe.2012.06.003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1058330012000328
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.rfe.2012.06.003?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. Harry Markowitz, 1952. "Portfolio Selection," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 7(1), pages 77-91, March.
    2. Al Janabi, Mazin A.M., 2012. "Optimal commodity asset allocation with a coherent market risk modeling," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(3), pages 131-140.
    3. Norland, Erik & Wilford, D. Sykes, 2002. "Global portfolios should be optimized in excess, not total returns," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 213-224.
    4. Benoit Mandelbrot, 2015. "The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Anastasios G Malliaris & William T Ziemba (ed.), THE WORLD SCIENTIFIC HANDBOOK OF FUTURES MARKETS, chapter 3, pages 39-78, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    5. Norland, Erik & Wilford, D. Sykes, 2002. "Leverage, liquidity, volatility, time horizon, and the risk of ruin: A barrier option approach," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 225-239.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Siamak Goudarzi & Mohammad Javad Jafari & Amir Afsar, 2017. "A Hybrid Model for Portfolio Optimization Based on Stock Clustering and Different Investment Strategies," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(3), pages 602-608.
    2. Karagiannidis, Iordanis & Sykes Wilford, D., 2015. "Modeling fund and portfolio risk: A bi-modal approach to analyzing risk in turbulent markets," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 19-26.
    3. Alejandra de la Rica Escudero & Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchan & Maria Coronado-Vaca, 2024. "Explainable Post hoc Portfolio Management Financial Policy of a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent," Papers 2407.14486, arXiv.org.
    4. Marina Malkina & Rodion Balakin, 2015. "Correlation Assessment of Tax System Risk and Profitability in the Russian Regions," Economy of region, Centre for Economic Security, Institute of Economics of Ural Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 1(3), pages 241-255.
    5. Iordanis Karagiannidis & D. Sykes Wilford, 2015. "Modeling fund and portfolio risk: A bi‐modal approach to analyzing risk in turbulent markets," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 25(1), pages 19-26, April.

    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. D. Sykes Wilford, 2012. "True Markowitz or assumptions we break and why it matters," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 21(3), pages 93-101, September.
    2. Al Janabi, Mazin A.M., 2014. "Optimal and investable portfolios: An empirical analysis with scenario optimization algorithms under crisis market prospects," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 369-381.
    3. Dominique Guégan & Wayne Tarrant, 2012. "On the necessity of five risk measures," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 8(4), pages 533-552, November.
    4. Bao, Te & Diks, Cees & Li, Hao, 2018. "A generalized CAPM model with asymmetric power distributed errors with an application to portfolio construction," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 611-621.
    5. Karagiannidis, Iordanis & Sykes Wilford, D., 2015. "Modeling fund and portfolio risk: A bi-modal approach to analyzing risk in turbulent markets," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 19-26.
    6. Luca Riccetti, 2013. "A copula–GARCH model for macro asset allocation of a portfolio with commodities," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 1315-1336, June.
    7. Mario Alejandro Acosta R., 2014. "Las acciones como activo de reserva para el Banco de la República," Documentos CEDE 11004, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    8. Douglas J. Hodgson & Oliver Linton & Keith Vorkink, 2002. "Testing the capital asset pricing model efficiently under elliptical symmetry: a semiparametric approach," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 17(6), pages 617-639, December.
    9. He, Xue-Zhong & Li, Youwei, 2015. "Testing of a market fraction model and power-law behaviour in the DAX 30," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 1-17.
    10. Jules Sadefo-Kamdem, 2011. "Downside Risk And Kappa Index Of Non-Gaussian Portfolio With Lpm," Working Papers hal-00733043, HAL.
    11. Rui Pedro Brito & Hélder Sebastião & Pedro Godinho, 2016. "Efficient skewness/semivariance portfolios," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 17(5), pages 331-346, September.
    12. Kerstens, Kristiaan & Mounir, Amine & Van de Woestyne, Ignace, 2011. "Geometric representation of the mean-variance-skewness portfolio frontier based upon the shortage function," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 210(1), pages 81-94, April.
    13. Jochen Güntner & Benjamin Karner, 2020. "Hedging with commodity futures and the end of normal Backwardation," Economics working papers 2020-21, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    14. Anand, Abhinav & Li, Tiantian & Kurosaki, Tetsuo & Kim, Young Shin, 2016. "Foster–Hart optimal portfolios," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 117-130.
    15. Ibragimov, Rustam & Walden, Johan, 2007. "The limits of diversification when losses may be large," Scholarly Articles 2624460, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    16. Fiedor, Paweł, 2014. "Sector strength and efficiency on developed and emerging financial markets," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 413(C), pages 180-188.
    17. Brisset, Nicolas, 2017. "On Performativity: Option Theory And The Resistance Of Financial Phenomena," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 39(4), pages 549-569, December.
    18. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2009. "Errors, robustness, and the fourth quadrant," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 25(4), pages 744-759, October.
    19. DiTraglia, Francis J. & Gerlach, Jeffrey R., 2013. "Portfolio selection: An extreme value approach," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 305-323.
    20. Immanuel Seidl, 2012. "Markowitz versus Regime Switching: An Empirical Approach," The Review of Finance and Banking, Academia de Studii Economice din Bucuresti, Romania / Facultatea de Finante, Asigurari, Banci si Burse de Valori / Catedra de Finante, vol. 4(1), pages 033-043, June.

    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:eee:revfin:v:21:y:2012:i:3:p:93-101. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620170 .

    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.