Post-Screening Portfolio Selection

Abstract

We propose post-screening portfolio selection (PS$^2$), a two-step framework for high-dimensional mean--variance investing. First, assets are screened by Lasso-type regression of a constant on excess returns without an intercept. Second, portfolio weights are estimated on the selected set using standard low-dimensional methods. Because strong factors can destroy sparsity in real data, we further introduce PS$^2$ with factors (FPS$^2$), which defactors returns before screening and allows factor investing in the final step. We establish theoretical guarantees, and simulations and an empirical application show competitive performance, especially when sparse screening is appropriate or strong factors are explicitly accommodated.