CO 778Portfolio Optimization

Basic optimization: quadratic minimization subject to leanear equality constraints. Effecient portfolios: the efficient frontier, the capital market line, Sharpe ratios and threshold returns. Practical portfolio optimization: short sales restrictions target portfolios, transactions costs. Quadratic programming theory. Special purpose quadratic programming algorithms for portfolio optimization: today's large investment firms expect to solve problems with at least 1000 assets, transactions costs and various side constraints in just a few minutes of computation time. This requires very specialized QP algorithms. An overview of such algorithms will be presented with computational results from commercial problems. The efficient frontier, the capital market line, Sharpe ratios and threshold returns in practice.