IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/quantf/v15y2015i7p1205-1215.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Equity portfolio diversification with high frequency data

Author

Listed:
  • Vitali Alexeev
  • Mardi Dungey

Abstract

Investors wishing to achieve a particular level of diversification may be misled on how many stocks to hold in a portfolio by assessing the portfolio risk at different data frequencies. High frequency intradaily data provide better estimates of volatility, which translate to more accurate assessment of portfolio risk. Using 5-min, daily and weekly data on S&P500 constituents for the period from 2003 to 2011, we find that for an average investor wishing to diversify away 85% (90%) of the risk, equally weighted portfolios of 7 (10) stocks will suffice, irrespective of the data frequency used or the time period considered. However, to assure investors of a desired level of diversification 90% of the time (in contrast to on average), using low frequency data results in an exaggerated number of stocks in a portfolio when compared with the recommendation based on 5-min data. This difference is magnified during periods when financial markets are in distress, as much as doubling during the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Suggested Citation

  • Vitali Alexeev & Mardi Dungey, 2015. "Equity portfolio diversification with high frequency data," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(7), pages 1205-1215, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:quantf:v:15:y:2015:i:7:p:1205-1215
    DOI: 10.1080/14697688.2014.973898
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14697688.2014.973898
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/14697688.2014.973898?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 look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ron Bird & Mark Tippett, 1986. "Note---Naive Diversification and Portfolio Risk---A Note," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 32(2), pages 244-251, February.
    2. John Knight & Colin Lizieri & Stephen Satchell, 2005. "Diversification When It Hurts? The Joint Distributions of Real Estate and Equity Markets," Real Estate & Planning Working Papers rep-wp2005-16, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    3. P. Silvapulle & C. W. J. Granger, 2001. "Large returns, conditional correlation and portfolio diversification: a value-at-risk approach," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(5), pages 542-551.
    4. Wasserfallen, Walter & Zimmermann, Heinz, 1985. "The behavior of intra-daily exchange rates," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 55-72, March.
    5. Mardi Dungey & Matteo Luciani & David Veredas, 2012. "Ranking Systemically Important Financial Institutions," CAMA Working Papers 2012-47, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.
    6. Yacine Aït-Sahalia & Jean Jacod, 2012. "Analyzing the Spectrum of Asset Returns: Jump and Volatility Components in High Frequency Data," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 50(4), pages 1007-1050, December.
    7. Annaert, Jan & Osselaer, Sofieke Van & Verstraete, Bert, 2009. "Performance evaluation of portfolio insurance strategies using stochastic dominance criteria," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 272-280, February.
    8. Elton, Edwin J & Gruber, Martin J, 1977. "Risk Reduction and Portfolio Size: An Analytical Solution," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 50(4), pages 415-437, October.
    9. Michael McAleer & Marcelo Medeiros, 2008. "Realized Volatility: A Review," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(1-3), pages 10-45.
    10. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Christoffersen, Peter F. & Diebold, Francis X., 2006. "Volatility and Correlation Forecasting," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 777-878, Elsevier.
    11. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim & Diebold, Francis X. & Ebens, Heiko, 2001. "The distribution of realized stock return volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 43-76, July.
    12. Bandi, Federico M. & Russell, Jeffrey R., 2006. "Separating microstructure noise from volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 79(3), pages 655-692, March.
    13. Kristin J. Forbes & Roberto Rigobon, 2002. "No Contagion, Only Interdependence: Measuring Stock Market Comovements," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(5), pages 2223-2261, October.
    14. Patton, Andrew J. & Sheppard, Kevin, 2009. "Optimal combinations of realised volatility estimators," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 218-238.
    15. Dimitrios Bisias & Mark Flood & Andrew W. Lo & Stavros Valavanis, 2012. "A Survey of Systemic Risk Analytics," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 255-296, October.
    16. Hansen, Peter R. & Lunde, Asger, 2006. "Realized Variance and Market Microstructure Noise," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 24, pages 127-161, April.
    17. Dale L. Domian & David A. Louton & Marie D. Racine, 2007. "Diversification in Portfolios of Individual Stocks: 100 Stocks Are Not Enough," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 42(4), pages 557-570, November.
    18. John L. Evans & Stephen H. Archer, 1968. "Diversification And The Reduction Of Dispersion: An Empirical Analysis," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 23(5), pages 761-767, December.
    19. Johnson, K. H. & Shannon, D. S., 1974. "A note on diversification and the reduction of dispersion," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 1(4), pages 365-372, December.
    20. Bloomfield, Ted & Leftwich, Richard & Long, John Jr., 1977. "Portfolio strategies and performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 201-218, November.
    21. Jérôme Lahaye & Sébastien Laurent & Christopher J. Neely, 2011. "Jumps, cojumps and macro announcements," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(6), pages 893-921, September.
    22. Andersen, Torben G. & Bollerslev, Tim, 1997. "Intraday periodicity and volatility persistence in financial markets," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 4(2-3), pages 115-158, June.
    23. Statman, Meir, 1987. "How Many Stocks Make a Diversified Portfolio?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 22(3), pages 353-363, September.
    24. Dungey, Mardi & McKenzie, Michael & Smith, L. Vanessa, 2009. "Empirical evidence on jumps in the term structure of the US Treasury Market," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(3), pages 430-445, June.
    25. Jennings, Edward H., 1971. "An Empirical Analysis of Some Aspects of Common Stock Diversification," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 6(2), pages 797-813, March.
    26. Fisher, Lawrence & Lorie, James H, 1970. "Some Studies of Variability of Returns on Investments in Common Stocks," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 43(2), pages 99-134, April.
    27. Klemkosky, Robert C & Martin, John D, 1975. "The Effect of Market Risk on Portfolio Diversification," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 30(1), pages 147-154, March.
    28. repec:eca:wpaper:2013/130530 is not listed on IDEAS
    29. Todorov, Viktor & Bollerslev, Tim, 2010. "Jumps and betas: A new framework for disentangling and estimating systematic risks," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 157(2), pages 220-235, August.
    30. John Knight & Colin Lizieri & Stephen Satchell, 2005. "Diversification when It Hurts? The Joint Distributions of Real Estate and Equity Markets1," Journal of Property Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(4), pages 309-323, December.
    31. Simone Brands & David R. Gallagher, 2005. "Portfolio selection, diversification and fund‐of‐funds: a note," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 45(2), pages 185-197, July.
    32. Tang, Gordon Y. N., 2004. "How efficient is naive portfolio diversification? an educational note," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 155-160, April.
    33. Beck, Kristine L & Perfect, Steven B & Peterson, Pamela P, 1996. "The Role of Alternative Methodology on the Relation between Portfolio Size and Diversification," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 31(2), pages 381-406, May.
    34. Blair, Bevan J. & Poon, Ser-Huang & Taylor, Stephen J., 2001. "Forecasting S&P 100 volatility: the incremental information content of implied volatilities and high-frequency index returns," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 5-26, November.
    35. Butler, K. C. & Joaquin, D. C., 2002. "Are the gains from international portfolio diversification exaggerated? The influence of downside risk in bear markets," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(7), pages 981-1011, December.
    36. Gençay, Ramazan & Dacorogna, Michel & Muller, Ulrich A. & Pictet, Olivier & Olsen, Richard, 2001. "An Introduction to High-Frequency Finance," Elsevier Monographs, Elsevier, edition 1, number 9780122796715.
    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. Reis, Pedro Nogueira & Pinto, António Pedro Soares, 2024. "Unlocking portfolio resilient and persistent risk: A holistic approach to unveiling potential grounds," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    2. Azra Zaimovic & Adna Omanovic & Almira Arnaut-Berilo, 2021. "How Many Stocks Are Sufficient for Equity Portfolio Diversification? A Review of the Literature," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-30, November.
    3. Vitali Alexeev & Katja Ignatieva, 2021. "Biases in variance of decomposed portfolio returns," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 21(4), pages 1152-1178, December.
    4. Gilles Boevi Koumou, 2020. "Diversification and portfolio theory: a review," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 34(3), pages 267-312, September.
    5. Vitali Alexeev & Mardi Dungey & Wenying Yao, 2016. "Continuous and Jump Betas: Implications for Portfolio Diversification," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 4(2), pages 1-15, June.
    6. Charles Shaw, 2022. "Portfolio Diversification Revisited," Papers 2204.13398, arXiv.org.
    7. Nadia Nadira Mohd Norsiman & Noor Azuddin Yakob & Carl B. McGowan, Jr, 2019. "The Effect of Portfolio Diversification for the Bursa Malaysia," Accounting and Finance Research, Sciedu Press, vol. 8(4), pages 1-76, November.
    8. Kangogo, Moses & Volkov, Vladimir, 2022. "Detecting signed spillovers in global financial markets: A Markov-switching approach," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).

    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. Vitali Alexeev & Francis Tapon, 2014. "The number of stocks in your portfolio should be larger than you think: diversification evidence from five developed markets," Published Paper Series 2014-4, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.
    2. Vitali Alexeev & Mardi Dungey & Wenying Yao, 2016. "Continuous and Jump Betas: Implications for Portfolio Diversification," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 4(2), pages 1-15, June.
    3. Alexeev, Vitali & Tapon, Francis, 2013. "Equity Portfolio Diversification: How Many Stocks are Enough? Evidence from Five Developed Markets," Working Papers 2013-16, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 20 Nov 2013.
    4. David Bradfield & Brian Munro, 2017. "The number of stocks required for effective portfolio diversification: the South African case," South African Journal of Accounting Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(1), pages 44-59, January.
    5. Haensly, Paul J., 2020. "Risk decomposition, estimation error, and naïve diversification," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    6. Florin Aliu & Besnik Krasniqi & Adriana Knapkova & Fisnik Aliu, 2019. "Interdependence and Risk Comparison of Slovak, Hungarian and Polish Stock Markets: Policy and Managerial Implications," Acta Oeconomica, Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary, vol. 69(2), pages 273-287, June.
    7. K. Liagkouras & K. Metaxiotis, 2018. "A new efficiently encoded multiobjective algorithm for the solution of the cardinality constrained portfolio optimization problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 267(1), pages 281-319, August.
    8. Sirapat Polwitoon & Oranee Tawatnuntachai, 2013. "In Search of Optimal Number of Bond Funds," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 3(1), pages 1-5.
    9. Yao, Wenying & Tian, Jing, 2015. "The role of intra-day volatility pattern in jump detection: empirical evidence on how financial markets respond to macroeconomic news announcements," Working Papers 2015-05, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics.
    10. Nuhiu Artor & Aliu Florin & Peci Bedri, 2022. "Assessing the diversification risk of a single equity market: evidence from the largest European stock indexes," International Journal of Management and Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of World Economy, vol. 58(1), pages 3-16, March.
    11. Azra Zaimovic & Adna Omanovic & Almira Arnaut-Berilo, 2021. "How Many Stocks Are Sufficient for Equity Portfolio Diversification? A Review of the Literature," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-30, November.
    12. Gilles Boevi Koumou, 2016. "Risk reduction and Diversification within Markowitz's Mean-Variance Model: Theoretical Revisit," Papers 1608.05024, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2016.
    13. K. Liagkouras & K. Metaxiotis, 2019. "Improving the performance of evolutionary algorithms: a new approach utilizing information from the evolutionary process and its application to the fuzzy portfolio optimization problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 272(1), pages 119-137, January.
    14. Haensly, Paul J., 2022. "Lessons from naïve diversification about the risk-reward trade-off," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    15. Henker, Thomas & Husodo, Zaäfri A., 2010. "Noise and efficient variance in the Indonesia Stock Exchange," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 199-216, April.
    16. Detlef Seese & Christof Weinhardt & Frank Schlottmann (ed.), 2008. "Handbook on Information Technology in Finance," International Handbooks on Information Systems, Springer, number 978-3-540-49487-4, November.
    17. Alexeev, Vitali & Dungey, Mardi & Yao, Wenying, 2017. "Time-varying continuous and jump betas: The role of firm characteristics and periods of stress," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 1-19.
    18. Tasca, Paolo & Mavrodiev, Pavlin & Schweitzer, Frank, 2014. "Quantifying the impact of leveraging and diversification on systemic risk," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 15(C), pages 43-52.
    19. Julien Chevallier & Benoît Sévi, 2011. "On the realized volatility of the ECX CO 2 emissions 2008 futures contract: distribution, dynamics and forecasting," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 7(1), pages 1-29, February.
    20. Paolo Tasca & Stefano Battiston, "undated". "Diversification and Financial Stability," Working Papers CCSS-11-001, ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • C63 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Computational Techniques

    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:taf:quantf:v:15:y:2015:i:7:p:1205-1215. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RQUF20 .

    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.