Managing Editor’s Letter

Abstract

david rowe Reprints Manager and Advertising Director Most portfolio optimization techniques require, in one way or another, forecasting the returns of the assets in the selection universe. In the lead article for this issue, “Deep Learning for Portfolio Optimization,” Zihao Zhang, Stefan Zohren, and Stephen Roberts adopt deep learning models to directly optimize a portfolio’s Sharpe ratio. Their framework circumvents the requirements for forecasting expected returns and allows the model to directly optimize portfolio weights through gradient ascent. Instead of using individual assets, the authors focus on exchange-traded funds of market indices due to their robust correlations, as well as reducing the scope of possible assets from which to choose. In a testing period from 2011 to April 2020, the proposed method delivers the best performance in terms of Sharpe ratio. A detailed analysis of the results during the recent COVID-19 crisis shows the rationality and practicality of their model. The authors also include a sensitivity analysis to understand how input features contribute to performance. Predicting business cycles and recessions is of great importance to asset managers, businesses, and macroeconomists alike, helping them foresee financial distress and to seek alternative investment strategies. Traditional modeling approaches proposed in the literature have estimated the probability of recessions by using probit models, which fail to account for non-linearity and interactions among predictors. More recently, machine learning classification algorithms have been applied to expand the number of predictors used to model the probability of recession, as well as incorporating interactions between the predictors. Although machine learning methods have been able to improve upon the forecasts of traditional linear models, the one crucial aspect that has been missing from the literature is the frequency at which recessions occur. Alireza Yazdani in “Machine Learning Prediction of Recessions: An Imbalanced Classification Approach,” argues that due to the low frequency of historical recessions, this problem is better dealt with by using an imbalanced classification approach. To compensate for the class imbalances, Yazdani uses down-sampling to create a roughly equal distribution of the non-recession and recession observations. Comparing the performance of the baseline probit model with various machine learning classification models, he finds that ensemble methods exhibit superior predictive power both in-sample and out-of-sample. He argues that nonlinear machine learning models help to both better identify various types of relationships in constantly changing financial data and enable the deployment of f lexible data-driven predictive modeling strategies. Most portfolio construction techniques rely on estimating sample covariance and correlations as the primary inputs. However, these b y gu es t o n Ju ne 1 4, 2 02 1. C op yr ig ht 2 02 0 Pa ge an t M ed ia L td .