Optimal portfolio performance with exchange-traded funds

Abstract

In this paper, the portfolio selection problem in exchange-traded fund (hereafter ETF) markets is considered. Since the ETFs track some market indexes with lower costs than the indexes, their development and popularity is grown enormously in the last decade. Moreover, ETF characteristics also present several advantages for the investors that we briefly examine for the U.S. and European markets of ETFs. In particular, we first introduce a new performance measure consistent with the optimal choices of non-satiable risk-averse investors and then we discuss the optimization of a few performance measures on the U.S. and European ETF markets. Finally, we propose an empirical comparison among the ex-post wealth obtained by optimizing the new performance measure, the Sharpe ratio and the Rachev ratio.