Master thesis project for students at KTH
http://www.nada.kth.se/~jaun/Projects.html
NADA, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Optimization of a Modern Portfolio

With his conjecture that investment risk can be quantified as volatility from the standard deviation of the expected return, H.Markowitz started in 1952 at the University of Chicago what has become the Modern Portfolio Theory, which awarded him in 1990 the counterpart of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Different models have been proposed since to calculate the volatility using uniform-, exponentional and auto-regressive conditional heteroscedastic weightings of the historical market prices and produced another Nobel Prize for R.Engle in 2003.

Building on these theories, this project aims at using real-time historical data to calculate the weight of the investments in a portfolio in such a manner as to maximize the expected return for a chosen level of the portfolio volatility. It combines basic financial engineering with numerical analysis, in a practical implementation using market data and a portfolio manager that are available from any web browser.

  1. Financial Modeling: Options, Swaps and Derivatives, A.Jaun, TRITA-NA-2003-0306
  2. Options Futures and Other Derivative Securities, J.C. Hull, Prentice-Hall International, New Jersey (2000)

For further information, contact André JAUN and consult http://www.nada.kth.se/~jaun.