Forming Efficient Frontier in Stock Portfolios by Utility Function, Risk Aversion, and Target Return

Abstract

Asset allocation has always been a challenging issue / for individuals and businesses to survive in our competitive world. One of the famous businesses, which has an enormous impact on people's lives worldwide, is the pension industry. Pension funds- as Defined Benefit, Defined Contribution, or others- accept reserves from contributors and try to invest them in a way to keep up with their obligations in the future or even pay more than that. The equity market has been one of the good choices for investment as pension funds try to reach a particular rate of return to maximize their wealth while considering not crossing red lines in taking risks. This paper will detail the new mathematical model for finding optimal stock portfolios using Generalized Co-Lower Partial Moment as a risk measure to minimize portfolio optimization. On the other hand, it introduces new tailored Expected Utility as a performance metric to maximize in this model. The proposed model's issue against previous studies is considering risk aversion and target rate of investment return as two significant investor characteristics. This is based on price returns' simulation of candidate stocks in TSE while using accurate and nonparametric Probability Density Function in historical data analysis.

Keywords

• risk aversion
• generalized co-lower partial moment
• target rate of return
• portfolio optimization
• reference dependent utility function