English

Second Order Risk

Portfolio Management 2009-08-19 v1 Risk Management

Abstract

Managing a portfolio to a risk model can tilt the portfolio toward weaknesses of the model. As a result, the optimized portfolio acquires downside exposure to uncertainty in the model itself, what we call "second order risk." We propose a risk measure that accounts for this bias. Studies of real portfolios, in asset-by-asset and factor model contexts, demonstrate that second order risk contributes significantly to realized volatility, and that the proposed measure accurately forecasts the out-of-sample behavior of optimized portfolios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0908.2455,
  title  = {Second Order Risk},
  author = {Peter G. Shepard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.2455},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

23 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:36:16.471Z