Here's the beginning of the note, click on it for the full pdf write-up (it has some math which doesn't display well here):

There are a couple different approaches to determining the best leverage to use for an overall portfolio. In finance 101 they teach Markowitz's mean-variance optimization where the efficient portfolios are along an optimal frontier and the best one among those is at the point where a line drawn from the risk free porfolio/asset is tangent to the frontier. In the 1950s Kelly derived a new optimal leverage criteria inspired by information theory (which had been established by Shannon a few years earlier). The criteria being optimized in these two cases is typically called an `objective function'- a function of possible asset weights/allocations that outputs a number giving the relative estimated quality of the portfolio weights. However, the two objective functions look quite different (peek ahead if you're unfamiliar). In this note I show the two are approximately equivalent, with the approximation being very close in realistic risk-return scenarios.

This is an equivalence that I haven't seen mentioned very often so I thought a formal version would be appropriate.

2 comments:

Henry Bee said...

Max,

You're exactly right. This can be seen in Bodie's textbook "Investments" chapter 6 - portfolio selection.

y = (Rp - Rf) / A*Variance

where A is risk aversion coefficient.

Henry

GM said...

You may want to check out this paper by Thorp, who uses/derives several forms & approximations of Kelly formula:
http://www.edwardothorp.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/KellyCriterion2007.pdf