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Not very interesting. You see allocation problems solved all of the time in finance, and this blog post doesn't have anything new. I also doubt that it's optim

Not very interesting. You see allocation problems solved all of the time in finance, and this blog post doesn't have anything new. I also doubt that it's optimal. An implementation using Hierarchical Risk Parity for instance would be more interesting. I assume you can model risk/uncertainty here. By the way, Google has an OR tools framework that implements these kind of solvers for you: https://developers.google.com/optimization https://developers.google.com/optimization

1000units 7y ago
Uninteresting comment. You see critical, speculative comments that offer no technical insight on Hacker News all the time. I also doubt the article was read. Demonstrating actual effort and understanding would be more interesting.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  What kind of insight did you want? Simply Google "portfolio optimization" and you will find many more interesting techniques. This is a basic LP problem that you'll come across in a textbook.
  - marktani 7y ago
    How many HN readers read about OR before? Haven't read the blog post yet but it seems like a nice way to refresh my knowledge from some obscure lecture I attended about it ~5 years ago ;)
  - 1000units 7y ago
    Here's an interesting comment with an interesting reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336687 By contrast, you effectively said, "Heh, I've seen fancier models. BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google."
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google Well, yeah, for something so rudimentary. Use a library. Nothing to see here.
ltbarcly3 7y ago
I think you are probably right, this does not seem optimal, it doesn't even seem that they recognized the class of problem that this is? It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema.
- codesushi42 7y ago
  It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema. Yep. You'll end up with a lopsided allocation, with one or two allocations holding a very large percentage of the total allocation. Distributing the allocation weights could help, e.g. with ensembling, regularization or some other kind of penalty.
bulldoa 7y ago
Are there recommended resource for understanding and applying these type of problems? I am quite interested in optimization and its real life application, currently reading linear optimization by bertsekas
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Take a course on discrete optimization. There's one on Coursera. Convex optimization is also useful if you care about optimizing convex functions. Which I bet you do.
twic 7y ago
There's also COIN-OR: https://www.coin-or.org/ https://www.coin-or.org/ When i compared them a year or so ago, my conclusion that OR-Tools had more focus on engineering, making the whole thing easy to integrate etc, whilst COIN-OR had more sophisticated solvers, and gave you lots and lots of knobs to tweak.

1000units 7y ago

Uninteresting comment. You see critical, speculative comments that offer no technical insight on Hacker News all the time. I also doubt the article was read. Demonstrating actual effort and understanding would be more interesting.

codesushi42 7y ago
What kind of insight did you want? Simply Google "portfolio optimization" and you will find many more interesting techniques. This is a basic LP problem that you'll come across in a textbook.
- marktani 7y ago
  How many HN readers read about OR before? Haven't read the blog post yet but it seems like a nice way to refresh my knowledge from some obscure lecture I attended about it ~5 years ago ;)
- 1000units 7y ago
  Here's an interesting comment with an interesting reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336687 By contrast, you effectively said, "Heh, I've seen fancier models. BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google."
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    BTW, you can just plug your stuff into Google Well, yeah, for something so rudimentary. Use a library. Nothing to see here.

ltbarcly3 7y ago

I think you are probably right, this does not seem optimal, it doesn't even seem that they recognized the class of problem that this is? It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema.

codesushi42 7y ago
It seems like they are attempting to use a greedy algorithm on a problem which very obviously has local extrema. Yep. You'll end up with a lopsided allocation, with one or two allocations holding a very large percentage of the total allocation. Distributing the allocation weights could help, e.g. with ensembling, regularization or some other kind of penalty.

bulldoa 7y ago

Are there recommended resource for understanding and applying these type of problems? I am quite interested in optimization and its real life application, currently reading linear optimization by bertsekas

codesushi42 7y ago
Take a course on discrete optimization. There's one on Coursera. Convex optimization is also useful if you care about optimizing convex functions. Which I bet you do.

twic 7y ago

There's also COIN-OR: https://www.coin-or.org/ https://www.coin-or.org/ When i compared them a year or so ago, my conclusion that OR-Tools had more focus on engineering, making the whole thing easy to integrate etc, whilst COIN-OR had more sophisticated solvers, and gave you lots and lots of knobs to tweak.