On the stability of portfolio selection models

One of the main issues in portfolio selection models consists in assessing the effect of the estimation errors of the parameters required by the models on the quality of the selected portfolios. Several studies have been devoted to this topic for the minimum variance and for several others minimum risk models. However, no sensitivity analysis seems to have been reported for the recent popular Risk Parity diversification approach, nor for other portfolio selection models requiring maximum gain-risk ratios. Based on a simulation approach, we provide here empirical evidence showing that the Risk Parity model is always the most stable one in all the cases analyzed. Furthermore, the minimum risk models are typically more stable than the maximum gain-risk models, with the minimum variance model being often the preferable one.