In this article I wanted to concentrate on some basic time series analysis, and on efforts to see if there is any simple way we can improve our prediction skills and abilities in order to produce more accurate results. When considering most financial asset price time series you would be forgiven for concluding that, at various time frames (some longer, some shorter) many, many of the data sets we try to analyse can appear completely random. At least random enough that any hope of easily forecasting future value and paths is going to be a tough ask at the every least!
Monthly Archives
July 2019
I thought today I would whip up a quick post regarding Jupyter Notebooks and how to download, install and use various “addons” that I like using and find more than just a little bit useful. Among other things I’ll show how to use the “jupyter-themes” module to change and manipulate the basic theme and styling of the overall notebook, I’ll show how to download and install the Jupyter Notebook extensions module giving access to a whole range of usefull goodies you can try out, and I’ll even show you how to use Jupyter widgets and how to embed URLs, PDFs, and Youtube videos directly into a notebook itself.
In this post I am going to be looking at portfolio optimisation methods, touching on both the use of Monte Carlo, “brute force” style optimisation and then the use of Scipy’s “optimize” function for “minimizing (or maximizing) objective functions, possibly subject to constraints”, as it states in the official docs (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/optimize.html).
I have to apologise at this point for my jumping back and forth between the UK English spelling of the word “optimise” and the US English spelling (optimize)…my fingers just won’t allow me to type it with a “z” unless I absolutely have to, for some reason!!! When quoting the official docs or referring to the actual function itself I shall use a “z” to fall in line.
To set up the first part of the problem at hand – say we are building, or have a portfolio of stocks, and we wish to balance/rebalance our holdings in such as way that they match the weights that would match the “optimal” weights if “optimal” meant the portfolio with the highest Sharpe ratio, also known as the “mean-variance optimal” portfolio.