Exploiting Market Integration for Pure Alpha Investments via Probabilistic Principal Factors Analysis

George  Tzagkarakis; Juliana  Caicedo-Llano; Thomas  Dionysopoulos

doi:10.4236/jmf.2013.31A018

George Tzagkarakis, Juliana Caicedo-Llano, Thomas Dionysopoulos

Abstract: In this paper, a long-short beta neutral portfolio strategy is proposed based on earnings yields forecasts, where positions are modified by accounting for time-varying risk budgeting by employing an appropriate integration measure. In contrast to previous works, which primarily rely on a standard principal component analysis (PCA), here we exploit the advantages of a probabilistic PCA (PPCA) framework to extract the factors to be used for designing an efficient integration measure, as well as relating these factors to an asset-pricing model. Our experimental evaluation with a dataset of 12 developed equity market indexes reveals certain improvements of our proposed approach, in terms of an increased representation capability of the underlying principal factors, along with an increased robustness to noisy and/or missing data in the original dataset.

Keywords: Market Integration; Risk budgeting; Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis

Cite this paper: G. Tzagkarakis, J. Caicedo-Llano and T. Dionysopoulos, "Exploiting Market Integration for Pure Alpha Investments via Probabilistic Principal Factors Analysis," Journal of Mathematical Finance, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2013, pp. 192-200. doi: 10.4236/jmf.2013.31A018.

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