Portfolio Allocations in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We construct international portfolios in dollars and local currencies. We compute the ex-ante weights by plugging five optimization models and two risk measures into a rolling block-bootstrap methodology. This allows us to derive 48 monthly rebalanced ex-post portfolio returns. We analyze the out-of-sample performance based on Sharpe and Sortino ratios and the Jobson-Korkie statistic. Our results highlight outstanding diversification benefits in the MENA region, both in dollar and local currencies. Overall, we show that these under-estimated, under-investigated markets could attract more portfolio flows in the future.

Keywords: Portfolio Allocation, Emerging Markets, Middle East and North Africa

JEL Classification: G11, G12, G15