Conditional Value-at-Risk-Based Portfolio Optimization

Abstract

Over the past few decades, an extensive research on the multi-objective decision making and combinatorial optimization of real world's financial transactions has taken place. The modern capital market theory problem of portfolio optimization stands to be a multi-objective problem aiming at the maximization of the expected return of the portfolio in turn minimizing portfolio risk. The conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a widely used measure for determining the risk measures of a portfolio in volatile market conditions. A heuristic approach to portfolio optimization problem using ant colony optimization (ACO) technique centering on optimizing the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) measure in different market conditions based on several objectives and constraints has been reported in this paper. The proposed ACO approach is proved to be reliable on a collection of several real-life financial instruments as compared to its value-at-risk (VaR) counterpart. The results obtained show encouraging avenues in determining optimal portfolio returns.