Dominating estimators for the global minimum

In this paper, we derive two shrinkage estimators for the global minimum variance portfolio that dominate the traditional estimator with respect to the out-of-sample variance of the portfolio return. The presented results hold for any number of observations n ≥ d + 2 and number of assets d ≥ 4 . The small-sample properties of the shrinkage estimators as well as their large-sample properties for fixed d but n → ∞ as well as n, d → ∞ but n/d → q ≤ ∞ are investigated. Furthermore, we present a small-sample test for the question of whether it is better to completely ignore time series information in favor of naive diversification.