Active Portfolio Management in Concentrated Equity Markets

Abstract

The equal-weighted portfolio is a passive, rule-based strategy that has historically been difficult to outperform, delivering higher returns than the capitalization-weighted"market"benchmark across many markets and periods. Stochastic portfolio theory (SPT) reveals that this relative performance is regime dependent, with the equal-weighted portfolio underperforming during periods of increasing market concentration and high correlations, particularly market bubbles. These observations have motivated us to formulate and solve a stochastic control problem in which an investor actively allocates between the equal-weighted and market portfolios. The investor bases their allocation decisions on forecasts made under a flexible stochastic diversity--dispersion (SDD) model. Using a quadratic surrogate for implementation frictions, we characterize the optimal allocation through a linear forward--backward SDE and obtain an explicit"aiming in front of a moving target''representation of the optimal trading rate, in the spirit of G\^arleanu and Pedersen. The penalty parameters are calibrated in sample to match the cumulative wealth effect of proportional transaction costs, while out-of-sample performance is evaluated with those costs deducted directly from portfolio wealth. Using historical S&P 500 data, we show that a mean-reverting SDD specification reproduces several empirical features of market diversity and dispersion. In out-of-sample backtests from 1995 to 2024, the resulting strategies deliver higher cumulative net returns than both the equal-weighted and market portfolios, and higher information ratios than the equal-weighted portfolio after 15-basis-point proportional transaction costs.