A Comparative Study of Hierarchical Risk Parity Portfolio and Eigen Portfolio on the NIFTY 50 Stocks

TL;DR

This study compares hierarchical risk parity and Eigen portfolio methods on NIFTY 50 stocks, finding HRP generally outperforms Eigen in portfolio performance across multiple sectors.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic comparison of HRP and Eigen portfolio approaches on Indian stock market sectors using historical data.

Findings

HRP outperforms Eigen in most sectors

Portfolios built on historical data show consistent results

HRP demonstrates superior risk-adjusted returns

Abstract

Portfolio optimization has been an area of research that has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and financial analysts. Designing an optimum portfolio is a complex task since it not only involves accurate forecasting of future stock returns and risks but also needs to optimize them. This paper presents a systematic approach to portfolio optimization using two approaches, the hierarchical risk parity algorithm and the Eigen portfolio on seven sectors of the Indian stock market. The portfolios are built following the two approaches to historical stock prices from Jan 1, 2016, to Dec 31, 2020. The portfolio performances are evaluated on the test data from Jan 1, 2021, to Nov 1, 2021. The backtesting results of the portfolios indicate that the performance of the HRP portfolio is superior to that of its Eigen counterpart on both training and test data for the majority of the sectors studied.