Statistics and Its Interface

Volume 11 (2018)

Number 1

Large portfolio allocation using high-frequency financial data

Pages: 141 – 152

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/SII.2018.v11.n1.a12

Authors

Jian Zou (Department of Mathematical Sciences, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A.)

Fangfang Wang (Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn., U.S.A.)

Yichao Wu (Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago, Il., U.S.A.)

Abstract

Asset allocation strategy involves dividing an investment portfolio among different assets according to their risk levels. In recent decades, estimating volatilities of asset returns based on high-frequency data has emerged as a topic of interest in financial econometrics. However, most available methods are not directly applicable when the number of assets involved is large, since small component-wise estimation errors could accumulate to large matrix-wise errors. In this paper, we introduce a method to carry out efficient asset allocation using sparsity-inducing regularization on the realized volatility matrix obtained from intraday high-frequency data. We illustrate the new method with the high-frequency price data on stocks traded in New York Stock Exchange over a period of six months in 2013. Simulation studies based on popular volatility models are also presented. The proposed methodology is theoretically justified. Numerical results also show that our approach performs well in portfolio allocation by pooling together the strengths of regularization and estimation from a high-frequency finance perspective.

Keywords

portfolio allocation, risk management, volatility matrix estimation, high-frequency data, regularization

Received 30 October 2016

Published 23 August 2017