High-Dimensional Portfolio Management

Portfolio management has always been a key topic in finance research area. While many researchers have studied portfolio management problems, most of the work to date assumes trading is frictionless. This dissertation presents our investigation of the optimal trading policies and efforts of applying duality method based on information relaxations to portfolio problems where the investor manages multiple securities and confronts trading frictions, in particular capital gain taxes and execution cost. In Chapter 2, we consider dynamic asset allocation problems where the investor is required to pay capital gains taxes on her investment gains. This is a very challenging problem because the tax to be paid whenever a security is sold depends on the tax basis, i.e. the price(s) at which the security was originally purchased. This feature results in high-dimensional and path-dependent problems which cannot be solved exactly except in the case of very stylized problems with just one or two securities and relatively few time periods. The asset allocation problem with taxes has several variations depending on: (i) whether we use the exact or average tax-basis and (ii) whether we allow the full