Paper 4, Section II, I
Consider a market with no riskless asset and risky stocks where the price of stock at time is denoted . We assume the vector is not random, and we let and . Assume is not singular.
Suppose an investor has initial wealth , which he invests in the stocks so that his wealth at time 1 is for some . He seeks to minimize the subject to his budget constraint and the condition that for a given constant .
Illustrate this investor's problem by drawing a diagram of the mean-variance efficient frontier. Write down the Lagrangian for the problem. Show that there are two vectors and (which do not depend on the constants and ) such that the investor's optimal portfolio is a linear combination of and .
Another investor with initial wealth seeks to maximize his expected utility of time 1 wealth, subject to his budget constraint. Assuming that is Gaussian and for a constant , show that the optimal portfolio in this case is also a linear combination of and .
[You may use the moment generating function of the Gaussian distribution without derivation.]
Continue to assume is Gaussian, but now assume that is increasing, concave, and twice differentiable, and that and are of exponential growth but not necessarily of the form . (Recall that a function is of exponential growth if for some constants positive constants .) Prove that the utility maximizing investor still holds a linear combination of and .
[You may use the Gaussian integration by parts formula
where is a vector of independent standard normal random variables, and is differentiable and of exponential growth. You may also interchange integration and differentiation without justification.]