A General Framework for Portfolio Theory. Part I: theory and various models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework unifying various portfolio theories by analyzing the trade-off between utility and risk, encompassing models like Markowitz, CAPM, and growth optimal portfolios.

Contribution

It presents a general theoretical framework that unifies and extends existing portfolio models, allowing for diverse risk measures and utility functions.

Findings

Efficient trade-offs form convex curves in utility-risk space.

The framework recovers and generalizes Markowitz and CAPM models.

It incorporates alternative risk measures like maximum drawdown.

Abstract

Utility and risk are two often competing measurements on the investment success. We show that efficient trade-off between these two measurements for investment portfolios happens, in general, on a convex curve in the two dimensional space of utility and risk. This is a rather general pattern. The modern portfolio theory of Markowitz [H. Markowitz, Portfolio Selection, 1959] and its natural generalization, the capital market pricing model, [W. F. Sharpe, Mutual fund performance , 1966] are special cases of our general framework when the risk measure is taken to be the standard deviation and the utility function is the identity mapping. Using our general framework, we also recover the results in [R. T. Rockafellar, S. Uryasev and M. Zabarankin, Master funds in portfolio analysis with general deviation measures, 2006] that extends the capital market pricing model to allow for the use of more general deviation measures. This generalized capital asset pricing model also applies to e.g. when an approximation of the maximum drawdown is considered as a risk measure. Furthermore, the consideration of a general utility function allows to go beyond the "additive" performance measure to a "multiplicative" one of cumulative returns by using the log utility. As a result, the growth optimal portfolio theory [J. Lintner, The valuation of risk assets and the selection of risky investments in stock portfolios and capital budgets, 1965] and the leverage space portfolio theory [R. Vince, The Leverage Space Trading Model, 2009] can also be understood under our general framework. Thus, this general framework allows a unification of several important existing portfolio theories and goes much beyond.