In this paper we investigate the applied performance of covariance shrinkage in the portfolio optimisation problem. We suggest that the optimal shrinkage coefficient should be obtained from a numerical optimisation of a function with financial interpretation. Such a function could be the...

We propose a new method for estimating the covariance matrix of a multivariate time series of financial returns. The method is based on estimating sample covariances from overlapping windows of observations which are then appropriately weighted to obtain the final covariance estimate. We extend...