On the Markowitz mean-variance analysis of self-financing portfolios

This paper extends the work of Markowitz (1952), Korkie and Turtle (2002) and others by first proving that the traditional estimate for the optimal return of self-financing portfolios always overestimates from its theoretic value. To circumvent the problem, we develop a bootstrap estimate for the optimal return of self-financing portfolios and prove that this estimate is consistent with its counterpart parameter. We further demonstrate the superiority of our proposed estimate over the traditional estimate by simulation.