Financial analysis based sectoral portfolio optimization under second order stochastic dominance

The study proposes to include the financial analysis (FA) in optimal portfolio selection. The role of FA in investment decisions is well recognized. While comparing two stocks on FA of their companies it is important to have both drawn from the same sector of economy. This reason motivated us to propose a sectoral portfolio optimization (SPO) which, instead of looking to optimize among all stocks together, focuses on optimizing stocks within each sector on the basis of FA. These stocks are then pooled together and an optimal portfolio is formed from them with their FA weights and mean returns. In context of FA, the four financial ratios included in present study are return on asset (profitable ratio), debt-assets ratio (solvency ratio), current ratio (liquidity ratio), and price-to-earning ratio (valuation ratio). The risk in a portfolio is quantified using the second order stochastic dominance and to this effect constraints are added in the selection process to generate optimal portfolios for rational risk averse investors. The performance of the optimal portfolios from the proposed model is tested against the portfolios from the traditional second order stochastic dominance model [named (SSDP) in this work], the benchmark index and four 5-star rated mutual funds of India from diversified equity. The out-of-sample analysis is carried on mean returns, Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, and also their ability to dominate the benchmark index in almost second order stochastic dominance sense over the tolerable violation regions. The stock price data for the period April 2004 to November 2014 of S&P BSE 500 index is used for testing the models. The optimal portfolios generated from the SPO perform better than the portfolios generated from the (SSDP), the benchmark index and the MFs, indicating effectiveness of FA in SPO framework.