Papers

Working papers from the allocation project — the theory behind the two novel methods. Drafts, revised as the work matures.

Thurstone Portfolio Polishing: Tail-Sensitive Black–Litterman and Beyond · Peter Cotton

Long-only allocation as the winning probabilities of a correlated race.

Abilities calibrate the race to a benchmark; the tilt re-runs it under the estimated dependence, so the portfolio is a controlled perturbation of the benchmark. It is free of the duplication paradox, tail-consistent when the race is driven by a downside-dependent simulation, and solves an implied convex-regularizer objective with a smoothness (low-turnover) bound. Built on the thurstone package.

Read online →  ·  Source

Schur-Complementary Allocation · Peter Cotton

Robust, inversion-light allocation along a smooth Fiedler seriation.

A one-parameter (gamma) bridge between hierarchical risk parity and minimum variance, ordered by Fiedler seriation rather than a dendrogram, so the hierarchy and the weights are a smooth function of the covariance. The idea first appeared as a blog post; the theory and experiments are in the paper, with background, bibliography, and a literature map at schur.microprediction.org.

Paper (arXiv 2411.05807) →  ·  Original blog  ·  Background & map