Penalty Methods for Continuous-Time Portfolio Selection with Proportional Transaction Costs

Abstract

We are concerned with numerical solutions for the continuous-time portfolio selection with proportional transaction costs which is described as a singular stochastic control problem. The associated value function is governed by a variational inequality with gradient constraints. We propose a penalty method to deal with the gradient constraints and employ the finite difference discretization. Convergence analysis is presented. We also show that the standard penalty method can be applied in the case of single risky asset where the problem can be reduced to a standard variational inequality. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the methods and to examine the behaviors of the optimal trading strategy.