Seminars

Optimal Portfolio Construction from Ordering Information

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Date: 04-04-2005
Start Time: 6:00pm
End Time: 7:30pm
Speaker: Neil Chriss, Managing Director of Quantitative Strategies, SAC Capital Management, LLC.
Location: 412 Shapiro CEPSR, Davis Auditorium

ABSTRACT

This talk explains a novel approach to building portfolios when you know the order, but not the values, of expected returns. The methods are very new and different; they extend the work of Markowitz on portfolio construction in a significant way. The key mathematics involved uses ideas from convex programming but yields remarkably simple and intuitive results. To our knowledge, this is the first and only paper studying this problem. The results of this work are portfolio construction methods that may be applied to a variety of situations in practice. We demonstrate the results on some sample trading strategies and show the relationship between how this method performs and other methods used by insiders perform.

This talk is based on joint work with Robert Almgren.

BIO

Neil Chriss joined SAC in 2003 to develop a quantitative trading business. He is in charge of building and managing new quantitative trading strategies at SAC. Prior to SAC, Neil was founder and President of ICor Brokerage Inc., a derivatives trading firm that was sold to Reuters Plc in 2004 and forms their global electronic trading system for interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives. Prior to ICor, Neil was a portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the Quantitative Strategies group. Neil has a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago and held academic positions in the mathematics departments at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study.