Minimum risk versus capital and risk diversification strategies for portfolio construction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an extensive empirical analysis on three categories of portfolio selection models with very different objectives: minimization of risk, maximization of capital diversification, and uniform distribution of risk allocation. The latter approach, also called Risk Parity or Equal Risk Contribution (ERC), is a recent strategy for asset allocation that aims at equally sharing the risk among all the assets of the selected portfolio. The risk measure commonly used to select ERC portfolios is volatility. We propose here new developments of the ERC approach using Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure. Furthermore, under appropriate conditions, we also provide an approach to find a CVaR ERC portfolio as a solution of a convex optimization problem. We investigate how these classes of portfolio models (Minimum-Risk, Capital-Diversification, and Risk-Diversification) work on seven investment universes, each with different sources of risk, including equities, bonds, and mixed assets. Then, we highlight some strengths and weaknesses of all portfolio strategies in terms of various performance measures.