Predicting Risk/Return Performance Using Upper Partial Moment/Lower Partial Moment Metrics

Abstract

Minimizing the classical definition of risk should be a counterintuitive venture as the explanatory nature of historical metrics’ construction challenges their ability to serve a predictive purpose on a non-stationary process. We uncover an ill-conceived bias in these metrics and discover that they provide a contrary indication to an investment’s survivability. The breakdown in the explanatory-predictive link is troubling and we aim to correct this via a better derived explanatory metric. The predictive variant of our metric will directly question the notion of optimization in order to serve the first priority of any continuous system, survival.