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Estimating Portfolio Quantiles for Periodic Investments

Article Quant Q&A · Author: silgon

Summary

The document considers the terminal value of periodic deposits when each contribution grows according to a lognormal return model. It asks whether the desired quantile of the total accumulated amount can be found by calculating each deposit’s quantile separately and adding those values. The answer explains that this does not work: quantiles of component values generally cannot be summed to obtain a quantile of their total.

Even when the individual contributions are modeled as independent lognormal variables, their weighted sum does not have an analytically tractable density in the setting described. The suggested practical method is Monte Carlo: draw a sufficiently large set of samples of the total value, sort them, and estimate the requested quantile from the empirical distribution. The document gives no convergence analysis or guidance on sample size, and independence is mentioned only as an assumption that does not resolve the closed-form difficulty.

Key ideas

  • The accumulated value is a sum of lognormally distributed contributions.
  • Adding individual contribution quantiles does not give the quantile of the total.
  • A sum of lognormal variables lacks a tractable closed-form density in this setting.
  • Monte Carlo sampling can estimate a desired quantile of the total investment value.
  • The answer does not specify sample-size or convergence criteria.

Tags

Full text
# Quantile with periodic investing


# Quantile with periodic investing












## Short Version

Can I get a quantile of such an expression? \begin{equation} \sum_{k=1}^{n} A_k\exp(\mathcal{N}(t_k\mu-\sigma\sqrt{t_k}/2,\sigma))) \end{equation}

I know I can do it for one part of the summation as stated here, however I would like to know if that can be also the case for the summation.

## Long Version

Let's say I have a periodic investment, in a really simplified case, we have the user deposits $A_1$, $A_2$ and $A_3$ as in the following image.

The deposits $A_1$, $A_2$ and $A_3$ happen at $t_1$, $t_2$ and $t_3$ respectively, being the period of time between each transaction $t$. The return of the period of time $t$ is $\mu$ and the volatility is $\sigma$.I want to know how much I have at time $t_3$ with a probability of $90\%$.

My variables are normally random distributed. This means that for example in order to project $A_1$ to the times $t_1$, $t_2$ and $t_3$ we will have the following equations:

\begin{equation} X_{A_1,t_1}\sim A_1\exp(\mathcal{N}(0t\mu-\sigma\sqrt{0t}/2,0\sigma))=A_1\\ X_{A_1,t_2}\sim A_1\exp(\mathcal{N}(t\mu-\sigma\sqrt{1t}/2,\sigma\sqrt{t}))\\ X_{A_1,t_3}\sim A_1\exp(\mathcal{N}(2t\mu-\sigma\sqrt{2t}/2,\sigma\sqrt{2t})) \end{equation}

In the first equation you have exactly the same money because your deposit was it $t_1$, the same time that we analyze. Now, we know that we can calculate a quantile for a normal distribution is $\Phi^{-1}_P=\mu+\sqrt{2}\sigma \operatorname {erf} ^{-1}(2P-1)$ where $P \in [0,1]$, in our case $.9$ because we want to verify $90\%$ and $\operatorname {erf}$ is the error function. Thus, we can calculate the quantile of $A_1$ in $t_3$ as follows:

\begin{equation} \Phi^{-1}_{A_1,t_3|P}= A_1\exp(2t\mu-\sigma\sqrt{2t}/2+\sqrt{2}\sigma\sqrt{2t} \operatorname {erf} ^{-1}(2P-1)) \end{equation}

Some reference to this equation here. My question is, can I sum all the values of the quantiles to $t_3$? or, how can I obtain the values of the quantiles at $t_3$?

I tried the following equation:

\begin{equation} \Phi^{-1}_{t_3|P}=\Phi^{-1}_{A_1,t_3|P}+\Phi^{-1}_{A_2,t_3|P}+\Phi^{-1}_{A_3,t_3|P} \end{equation}

As shown before, the last term of the quation is just $A_3$ but the others depend on the time and the quantile. This equation is not right, I have some dissimilarities with a montecarlo simulation I did to verify the results.

I'm almost certain I must not sum quantiles the way I did, but I cannot find the proper resource to verify the equations.

## Answer by Quantuple (score 2)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/35431

The random variable $$X = \sum_{k=1}^{n} A_k\exp(\mathcal{N}(t_k\mu-\sigma\sqrt{t_k}/2,\sigma)))$$ emerges as a weighted sum of individual random variables that are log-normally distributed.

Unfortunately, even if we assume that the individual r.v. involved in the sum are independent, a sum of log-normals (here $X$) possesses no analytically tractable probability density function.

You will therefore not be able to find a closed-form expression for the quantiles of $X$.

A practical solution however could be to use a "Monte Carlo" simulation in the loose sense: draw a (sufficient) number $M$ of random samples from $X$, $(x_i)_{i=1,...,M}$; sort them in ascending order and infer the desired quantile

These related questions (here and there) may also help I guess.

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.