arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Vic Norton.
We use the 2014 market history of two high-returning biotechnology exchange-traded funds to illustrate how ex post mean-variance analysis should not be done. Unfortunately, the way it should not be done is the way it generally is done -- to our knowledge.
We present an algorithm for the decomposition of periodic financial return data into orthogonal factors of expected return and "systemic", "productive", and "nonproductive" risk. Generally, when the number of funds does not exceed the number of periods, the expected return of a portfolio is an affine function of its productive risk.
Historical returns depend on historical closing prices and distributions. We describe how to compute adjusted closing prices from closing price/distribution data with an emphasis on spreadsheet implementation. Then the growth of a security from one date to another (1 + total return) is just the ratio of the corresponding adjusted closing prices.
The vector of periodic, compound returns of a typical investment portfolio is almost never a convex combination of the return vectors of the securities in the portfolio. As a result the ex post version of Harry Markowitz's "standard mean-variance portfolio selection model" does not apply to compound return data. We propose using notional portfolios and normalized linear returns to remedy this problem.