Optimal portfolio selection problems are determined by the (unknown) parameters of the data generating process. If an investor wants to realize the position suggested by the optimal portfolios, he/she needs to estimate the unknown parameters and to account for the parameter uncertainty in the decision process. Most often, the parameters of interest are the population mean vector and the population covariance matrix of the asset return distribution. In this paper, we characterize the exact sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics. This is done by deriving their sampling distribution by its stochastic representation. This approach possesses several advantages, e.g. (i) it determines the sampling distribution of the estimated optimal portfolio weights by expressions, which could be used to draw samples from this distribution efficiently; (ii) the application of the derived stochastic representation provides an easy way to obtain the asymptotic approximation of the sampling distribution. The later property is used to show that the high-dimensional asymptotic distribution of optimal portfolio weights is a multivariate normal and to determine its parameters. Moreover, a consistent estimator of optimal portfolio weights and their characteristics is derived under the high-dimensional settings. Via an extensive simulation study, we investigate the finite-sample performance of the derived asymptotic approximation and study its robustness to the violation of the model assumptions used in the derivation of the theoretical results.

In this paper, new results in random matrix theory are derived, which allow us to construct a shrinkage estimator of the global minimum variance (GMV) portfolio when the shrinkage target is a random object. More specifically, the shrinkage target is determined as the holding portfolio estimated from previous data. The theoretical findings are applied to develop theory for dynamic estimation of the GMV portfolio, where the new estimator of its weights is shrunk to the holding portfolio at each time of reconstruction. Both cases with and without overlapping samples are considered in the paper. The non-overlapping samples corresponds to the case when different data of the asset returns are used to construct the traditional estimator of the GMV portfolio weights and to determine the target portfolio, while the overlapping case allows intersections between the samples. The theoretical results are derived under weak assumptions imposed on the data-generating process. No specific distribution is assumed for the asset returns except from the assumption of finite 4+ε, ε>0, moments. Also, the population covariance matrix with unbounded largest eigenvalue can be considered. The performance of new trading strategies is investigated via an extensive simulation. Finally, the theoretical findings are implemented in an empirical illustration based on the returns on stocks included in the S&P 500 index.

The main contribution of this paper is the derivation of the asymptotic behavior of the out-of-sample variance, the out-of-sample relative loss, and of their empirical counterparts in the high-dimensional setting, i.e., when both ratios p/n and p/n tend to some positive constants as 𝑚 → ∞ and 𝑚 → ∞, where p is the portfolio dimension, while n and m are the sample sizes from the in-sample and out-of-sample periods, respectively. The results are obtained for the traditional estimator of the global minimum variance (GMV) portfolio and for the two shrinkage estimators introduced by Frahm and Memmel (2010) and Bodnar et al. (2018). We show that the behavior of the empirical out-of-sample variance may be misleading in many practical situations, leading, for example, to a comparison of zeros. On the other hand, this will never happen with the empirical out-of-sample relative loss, which seems to provide a natural normalization of the out-of-sample variance in the high-dimensional setup. As a result, an important question arises if the out-of-sample variance can safely be used in practice for portfolios constructed from a large asset universe.