Portfolios and the Market Geometry

Abstract

A geometric analysis of return time series, performed in the past, implied that most of the systematic information in the market is contained in a space of small dimension. Here we have explored subspaces of this space to find out the relative performance of portfolios formed from companies that have the largest projections in each one of the subspaces. As expected, it was found that the best performance portfolios are associated with some of the small eigenvalue subspaces and not to the dominant dimensions. This is found to occur in a systematic fashion over an extended period (1990–2008).