Patrick Burns /

Portfolio Probing

The ultimate aim of the Portfolio Probing blog is to help make fund management more effective, to make savings safer through better tools and better methods. Patrick Burns, the founder of Burns Statistics, offers a unique mix of experience in quantitative finance, statistics, computing and writing.

US market portrait 2013 week 52

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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Further adventures with higher moments

Additional views of the stability of skewness and kurtosis of equity portfolios. Previously A post called “Four moments of portfolios” introduced the idea of looking at the stability of the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of portfolios through time. That post gave birth to a presentation at the London Quant Group. That talk gave birth … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2013 week 51

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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Another tale of two returns

The further adventures of returns on short positions. Previously There are three posts that are instructive about returns: A tale of two returns Returns with negative net asset values An easy mistake with returns There is also a (satirical) post on the statistical distribution of returns: “The distribution of financial returns made simple”. Scenarios You … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2013 week 50

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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The efficacy of higher moments in portfolio optimization

On Monday I gave a talk at the London Quant Group entitled “Exploring the efficacy of higher moments in portfolio optimisation”.  A substantial number of people showed up, and they taught me quite a lot about the subject.  So it seems to have been successful. There are now annotated slides available. The slides point towards … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2013 week 49

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2013 week 48

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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London Quant Group, and other upcoming events

Highlighted London Quant Group 2013 December 9, London. Pat Burns on “Exploring the efficacy of higher moments in portfolio optimisation”. Abstract: Typically portfolio optimisation only uses the first two moments — expected returns and variance.  Is it useful to also use skewness and kurtosis?  This talk will take a new look at optimisation, and then from … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2013 week 47

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo Almost all of the S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by Wikipedia on 2013 January 5 — see the R commands to scrape the data) The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free … Continue reading

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