Optimization with Performance-Attribution Constraints

How well a portfolio performs is of primary concern for investors and governs investor confidence in the portfolio’s management. Attribution analysis provides measures for how well a portfolio is being managed. While performance-attribution measures have been used traditionally as a diagnostic tool, this chapter introduces the recent development to include these measures as constraints in portfolio optimization. Two such measures, asset allocation and the selection effect, are used to constrain conditional value-at-risk optimization of the domestic REIT portfolio under historical and dynamic optimization. The results are analyzed in terms of price and reward-to-risk performance measures. Performance improvement is then characterized in terms of the attribution measure used as the constraint, the optimization method, and the level of turnover constraint