Conference Agenda
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 15th Sept 2026, 08:44:24am CEST
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AP 02: Machine Learning Methods in Portfolio Management and Fund Behavior Location: LR M2.2 (Floor 2) Session Chair: Andy Neuhierl, Purdue University | |
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ID: 539
Machine Learning Meets Markowitz 1: Tongji University, China; 2: Tsinghua University, PBC School of Finance, China; 3: Duke University, USA; 4: National Bureau of Economic Research, USA; 5: Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management, China; 6: New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA The standard approach to portfolio selection involves two stages: forecast the asset returns and then plug them into an optimizer. We argue that this separation is deeply problematic. The first stage treats cross-sectional prediction errors as equally important across all securities. However, given that final portfolios might differ given distinct risk preferences and investment restrictions, the standard approach fails to recognize that the investor is not just concerned with the average forecast error – but the precision of the forecasts for the specific assets that are most important for their portfolio. Hence, it is crucial to integrate the two stages. We propose a novel implementation utilizing machine learning tools that unifies the expected return generation process and the final optimized portfolio. Our empirical example provides convincing evidence that our end-to-end method outperforms the traditional two-stage approach. In our framework, each investor has their own, endogenously determined, efficient frontier that depends on risk preferences, investor-specific constraints, as well as exposure to market frictions.
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