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Markowitz meets Talmud: A combination of sophisticated and naive diversification strategies

Author

Listed:
  • Jun Tu

    (Singapore Management University)

  • Guofu Zhou

    (Olin School of Business, Washington University)

Abstract

The modern portfolio theory pioneered by Markowitz (1952) is widely used in practice and extensively taught to MBAs. However, the estimated Markowitz portfolio rule and most of its extensions not only underperform the naive 1/N rule (that invests equally across N assets) in simulations, but also lose money on a risk-adjusted basis in many real data sets. In this paper, we propose an optimal combination of the naive 1/N rule with one of the four sophisticated strategies—the Markowitz rule, the Jorion (1986) rule, the MacKinlay and Pastor (2000) rule, and the Kan and Zhou (2007) rule—as a way to improve performance. We find that the combined rules not only have a significant impact in improving the sophisticated strategies, but also outperform the 1/N rule in most scenarios. Since the combinations are theory-based, our study may be interpreted as reaffirming the usefulness of the Markowitz theory in practice.

Suggested Citation

  • Jun Tu & Guofu Zhou, 2011. "Markowitz meets Talmud: A combination of sophisticated and naive diversification strategies," CEMA Working Papers 715, China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:cuf:wpaper:715
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Portfolio choice; Mean–variance analysis; Parameter uncertainty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

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