Towards the Design of Better Equity Benchmarks

Presentation :

The author finds that maximum Sharpe ratio portfolios consistent with such expected return proxies, and built upon improved estimates of the correlation parameters, significantly outperform market cap weighted schemes on a risk-adjusted basis. This analysis, which rehabilitates the role of the tangency portfolio from modern portfolio theory, suggests that better equity benchmarks can be designed, provided that a sophisticated portfolio optimization procedure is used that relies on robust estimates of moments and co-moments of stock return distributions. This paper has important potential implications for the ongoing debate on appropriate weighting schemes for equity indices.