Compound Wishart Matrices and Noisy Covariance Matrices: Risk Underestimation

Abstract: In this paper, we obtain a property of the expectation of the inverse of compound Wishart matrices which results from their orthogonal invariance. Using this property as well as results from random matrix theory (RMT), we derive the asymptotic effect of the noise induced by estimating the covariance matrix on computing the risk of the optimal portfolio. This in turn enables us to get an asymptotically unbiased estimator of the risk of the optimal portfolio not only for the case of independent observations but also in the case of correlated observations. This improvement provides a new approach to estimate the risk of a portfolio based on covariance matrices estimated from exponentially weighted moving averages of stock returns.