The Cross-Section of Risk and Return
In the finance literature, a common practice is to create characteristic portfolios by sorting on characteristics associated with average returns. We show that the resulting portfolios are likely to capture not only the priced risk associated with the characteristic, but also unpriced risk. We develop a procedure to remove this unpriced risk using covariance information estimated from past returns. We apply our methodology to the five Fama and French (2015) characteristic portfolios. The squared Sharpe ratio of the optimal combination of the resulting characteristic efficient portfolios is 2.16, compared with 1.16 for the original characteristic portfolios.
Published Versions
Kent Daniel & Lira Mota & Simon Rottke & Tano Santos & Andrew Karolyi, 2020. "The Cross-Section of Risk and Returns," The Review of Financial Studies, vol 33(5), pages 1927-1979. citation courtesy of