Portfolio selection with a drawdown constraint [An article from: Journal of Banking and Finance]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Banking and Finance, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
When identifying optimal portfolios, practitioners often impose a drawdown constraint. This constraint is even explicit in some money management contracts such as the one recently involving Merrill Lynch' management of Unilever's pension fund. In this setting, we provide a characterization of optimal portfolios using mean-variance analysis. In the absence of a benchmark, we find that while the constraint typically decreases the optimal portfolio's standard deviation, the constrained optimal portfolio can be notably mean-variance inefficient. In the presence of a benchmark such as in the Merrill Lynch-Unilever contract, we find that the constraint increases the optimal portfolio's standard deviation and tracking error volatility. Thus, the constraint negatively affects a portfolio manager's ability to track a benchmark.