English

Notes on Fano Ratio and Portfolio Optimization

Portfolio Management 2018-04-12 v2 Risk Management

Abstract

We discuss - in what is intended to be a pedagogical fashion - generalized "mean-to-risk" ratios for portfolio optimization. The Sharpe ratio is only one example of such generalized "mean-to-risk" ratios. Another example is what we term the Fano ratio (which, unlike the Sharpe ratio, is independent of the time horizon). Thus, for long-only portfolios optimizing the Fano ratio generally results in a more diversified and less skewed portfolio (compared with optimizing the Sharpe ratio). We give an explicit algorithm for such optimization. We also discuss (Fano-ratio-inspired) long-short strategies that outperform those based on optimizing the Sharpe ratio in our backtests.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.10640,
  title  = {Notes on Fano Ratio and Portfolio Optimization},
  author = {Zura Kakushadze and Willie Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.10640},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

29 pages; a few trivial typos corrected, no other changes

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:00:18.972Z