Trading strategies generated by Lyapunov functions (Q2364535)

The authors revise the well-known Fernholz's portfolio construction via an interpretation of portfolio-generating functions as Lyapunov functions for the vector process of relative market weights. This functional generation is generalized from portfolios to trading strategies which may involve short-selling, as well as to situations where some, but not all, of the market weights can vanish. Along the way, the authors introduce the new notion of ``additive functional generation'' of strategies, and compare it to the ``multiplicative'' generation. Such point of view allows the formulation of conditions under which it is possible to outperform the market portfolio over appropriate time horizons. Conditions guaranteeing the existence of relative arbitrage with respect to the market over sufficiently long time horizons are formulated. It is proved that concave functions satisfying certain additional assumptions are indeed Lyapunov, and counterexamples in which those additional assumptions are not satisfied, are provided. From a probabilistic point of view, this approach yields results concerning the interplay of stochastic discount factors and concave transformations of semimartingales on compact domains. Many previous results in this area are unified, simplified and generalized using the above approach.