Simulation-Based Optimal Portfolio Selection Strategy—Evidence from Asian Markets

Recently portfolio optimization has become widely popular in risk management, and the common practice is to use mean-variance or Value-at-Risk (VaR), despite the VaR being incoherent risk measure because of the lack of subadditivity. This has led to the emergence of the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) approach, consequently, a gradual development of mean-CVaR portfolio optimization. To seek an optimal portfolio selection strategy and increase the robustness of the result, the paper studies the performance of portfolio optimization in Asian markets using a Monte-Carlo simulation tool, creates a variety of randomly selected portfolios that consists of Asian ADRs listed in NYSE from 2011 to 2016, and applies both optimization frameworks with different skewed fat-tailed distributions, including the Generalized Hyperbolic (GH) and skewed-T distribution. The main result shows that the Generalized Hyperbolic distribution produces the lowest risk under a given rate of return, while the skewed-T distribution creates a diversification allocation outcome similar to that of historical simulation.