Alexandria Digital Research Library

Rebalancing Portfolios under Transaction Costs

Author:
Sau, Raj
Degree Grantor:
University of California, Santa Barbara. Statistics and Applied Probability
Degree Supervisor:
Jean-Pierre Fouque
Place of Publication:
[Santa Barbara, Calif.]
Publisher:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Creation Date:
2012
Issued Date:
2012
Topics:
Statistics
Genres:
Online resources and Dissertations, Academic
Dissertation:
Ph.D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2012
Description:

In this thesis we study the performance of a re-balanced portfolio strategy relative to the market portfolio in the presence of transaction costs. The strategy involves re-balancing to fixed weights at regular time steps. We consider an equity market with m Stocks. Our goal is to compare the asymptotic growth rate of such strategies to the market. With the application of an Ergodic theorem, we show that the problem can be transformed to computing the expectation of a functional of the market weights of the stocks. Expressing the gain in the re-balanced portfolio over the market portfolio as a functional of the market weights, we derive the condition under which the growth rate of the rebalanced strategy beats that of the market portfolio. We also show a method to compute the maximum transaction cost that can be paid in order for the rebalanced portfolio to beat the market portfolio. We discuss the result in the context of the Volatility-Stabilized model and the Geometric Brownian Motion model. In the second part of the thesis, we define the optimal re-balancing portfolio that maximizes the growth rate within the class of such fixed weight re-balancing strategies. We study the relationship of the optimum portfolio and optimal growth rate to the re-balancing time step and transaction cost coefficient. Finally, we look at the performance of such re-balancing strategies on real data sets obtained from Yahoo Finance. The study indicates that for small trading time steps, the re-balancing strategy under performs compared to the market in the presence of transaction costs.

Physical Description:
1 online resource (98 pages)
Format:
Text
Collection(s):
UCSB electronic theses and dissertations
ARK:
ark:/48907/f39w0cfx
ISBN:
9781267768278
Catalog System Number:
990039148130203776
Rights:
Inc.icon only.dark In Copyright
Copyright Holder:
Raj Sau
Access: This item is restricted to on-campus access only. Please check our FAQs or contact UCSB Library staff if you need additional assistance.