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I've often wondered about the 1/n strategy. It's simple enough: invest in n assets equally, and rebalance them regularly.

However, there are some questions: how does one know which n assets to pick? Should they be mostly decorrelated? How decorrelated? And shouldn't all n assets have > 50% probability of growth? And what should the number n be? These aren't always easy questions to answer. After all, you could pick n dud assets that are highly correlated, and the strategy would fail.

I'm curious: how do folks apply the 1/n strategy in practice?



Generalizing, there are 3 problems:

1- Alpha prediction (forecasting a return for each asset)

2- Portfolio Construction

3- Portfolio realization - trading

I was referring to problem #2, which assumes you have a priori alpha forecasts and the relative confidence of those forecasts. In the general portfolio construction problem, the past mean returns of stocks is taken to be the future return.




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