Comparison of Different Estimation Techniques for Portfolio Selection

The main obstacle in the application of the mean-variance portfolio selection is the fact that the moments of the asset returns are unknown. In practice the optimal portfolio weights are estimated by replacing these moments with the classical unbiased sample estimators. We provide a comparison of the exact and the asymptotic distributions of these estimated portfolio weights as well as a sensitivity analysis to shifts in the moments of the asset returns. Furthermore the paper compares the classical estimators of the moments of the asset returns with the recently proposed shrinkage estimators within the framework of portfolio selection. It is shown how the uncertainty about the portfolio weights can be introduced into the performance measurement of trading strategies. The methodology explains the bad out-of-sample performance of the classical Markowitz procedures.