Relative utility bounds for empirically optimal portfolios

Abstract: We consider a single-period portfolio selection problem for an investor, maximizing the expected ratio of the portfolio utility and the utility of a best asset taken in hindsight. The decision rules are based on the history of stock returns with unknown distribution. Assuming that the utility function is Lipschitz or H\"{o}lder continuous (the concavity is not required), we obtain high probability utility bounds under the sole assumption that the returns are independent and identically distributed. These bounds depend only on the utility function, the number of assets and the number of observations. For concave utilities similar bounds are obtained for the portfolios produced by the exponentiated gradient method. Also we use statistical experiments to study risk and generalization properties of empirically optimal portfolios. Herein we consider a model with one risky asset and a dataset, containing the stock prices from NYSE.