Selecting Portfolios with Fixed Costs and Minimum Transaction Lots

The original Markowitz model of portfolio selection has received a widespread theoretical acceptance and it has been the basis for various portfolio selection techniques. Nevertheless, this normative model has found relatively little application in practice when some additional features, such as fixed costs and minimum transaction lots, are relevant in the portfolio selection problem. In this paper different mixed-integer linear programming models dealing with fixed costs and possibly minimum lots are introduced. Due to the high computational complexity of the models, heuristic procedures, based on the construction and optimal solution of mixed integer subproblems, are proposed. Computational results obtained using data from the Milan Stock Exchange show how the proposed heuristics yield very good solutions in a short computational time and make possible some interesting financial conclusions on the impact of fixed costs and minimum lots on portfolio composition.