Investors often adopt mean-variance efficient portfolios for achieving superior risk-adjusted returns. However, such portfolios are sensitive to estimation errors, which affect portfolio performance. To understand the impact of estimation errors, I develop simple and intuitive formulas of the...

I jointly treat two critical issues in the application of mean-variance portfolios, i.e., estimation risk and portfolio instability. I find that theory-based portfolio strategies known to outperform naive diversification (1/N) in the absence of transaction costs, heavily underperform it under...

We investigate how to best model skewness for portfolio choice decisions. To this end, we compare the predictive ability and portfolio performance of several prominent skewness models in a sample of ten international equity market indices. Overall, models that employ information from the option...