Portfolio Optimization: New Challenges and Perspectives

Marina      Resta

Abstract

Time is coming to celebrate the 60th anniversary from the pioneering work of Markowitz on portfolio selection. His main contribution was to understand that investment decisions did not merely rely on which securities to own, but on how to divide the investors wealth amongst securities, thus individuating in the portfolio diversification a key issue to focus on. This approach literally shivered the world of finance, and traced the path along which researchers and practitioners are still moving on. This paper is intended to provide a review on the state of the art for portfolio optimization sixty years later, pointing on the issues that still remain challenging, and identifying the key patents that have emerged in this field.

Keywords: Alternative optimization schemes, mean-variance approach, portfolio optimization, Problem Constraints, Object Function, Soft Computing Approach, plurality of constraints, mean-variance model, memetic algorithm, VaR