Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T01:13:19.335Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Portfolio Selection in a Log-Stable Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

Extract

The Stable (or Pareto-Lévy) distribution has been of considerable interest in describing the behavior of security prices ever since the important work by Mandelbrot [6], [7] and Fama [1]. The aforementioned contributions focused on the empirical hypothesis that security price data are better fitted by theoretical distributions with infinite variance rather than finite variance. Specifically, in the case of Stable distributions, the “characteristic exponent” is less than two, and the data are not adequately fitted by a normal distribution. Remarkably, however, although almost the entire body of literature addressing empirical questions with respect to the distribution of security prices investigages the behavior of the (natural) logarithm of security price relatives, to this author's knowledge no paper exists which analyzes the portfolio choice implications of the assumption that the logarithm of the asset returns has a symmetric Stable distribution with infinite variance. Thus, in Fama [2], Samuelson [10], and Ziemba [12], where the problem of selecting an optimal portfolio in Stable markets is the object of concern, one finds that it is assumed that the price-relatives (returns) have a Stable distribution; this rather than the logarithm of the price relatives. And it should be noted that none of these authors suggests that the untransformed price-relatives are better-fitted by a symmetric Stable distribution as compared with the logarithm of the price-relatives.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © School of Business Administration, University of Washington 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

[1]Fama, E.The Behavior of Stock Market Prices.” Journal of Business (1965), pp. 34105.Google Scholar
[2]Fama, E.Portfolio Analysis in a Stable Paretan Market.” Management Science (1965), pp. 404419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[3]Fama, E.Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Fmpirical Work.” Journal of Finance, vol. 25 (1970), pp. 383417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[4]Fishburn, P. C.Utility Theory for Decision Making. New York: Wiley, 1970.Google Scholar
[5]Loeve, M.Probability Theory, 3rd edition. Princeton, N.J.: Van Norstrand Co., Inc., 1963.Google Scholar
[6]Mandelbrot, B.The Variations of Certain Speculative Prices.” Journal of Business, vol. 36 (1963), pp. 394419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[7]Mandelbrot, B.New Methods of Statistical Economics.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 61 (1963), pp. 421440.Google Scholar
[8]Merton, R. C.Optimum Consumption and Portfolio Rules in a Continuous-Time Model.” Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 3 (December 1971).Google Scholar
[9]Rockefellar, R. T.Convex Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
[10]Samuelson, P. A.Efficient Portfolio Selection for Pareto-Levy Investments.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, vol. 2 (1967), pp. 107122.Google Scholar
[11]Samuelson, P. A.General Proof that Diversification Pays.” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, March 1967, pp. 113.Google Scholar
[12]Ziemba, W. T. “Choosing Investment Portfolios when the Returns Have Stable Distributions: A Stochastic Programming Approach.” Technical Report 72–14, August 1972, Operations Research House, Stanford University, Stanford, California. Presented at the Nato Advanced Study Institute on Mathematical Programming in Theory and Practice, Figneira da Fax, Portugal, June 12–23, 1972.Google Scholar