Portfolio Optimization with DARA Stochastic Dominance Constraints

An optimization method is developed for constructing investment portfolios which stochastically dominate a given benchmark for all decreasing absolute risk-averse investors, using Quadratic Programming. The method is applied to standard data sets of historical returns of equity price reversal and momentum portfolios. The proposed optimization method improves upon the performance of Mean-Variance optimization by tens to hundreds of basis points per annum, for low to medium risk levels. The improvements critically depend on imposing the complex condition of Decreasing Absolute Risk Aversion in addition to the simpler conditions of global risk aversion and decreasing risk aversion