Stock Portfolio Periodic Rebalancing vs. Buy-and-Hold

Is periodic rebalancing of a stock portfolio advantageous? In his May 2021 paper entitled “Does Volatility Harvesting Really Work?”, Magnus Pedersen compares performances of periodic rebalancing versus no rebalancing (buy-and-hold) for thousands of randomly constructed and initially equal-weighted portfolios of U.S. stocks. He tries different numbers of holdings, different start/end dates and different rebalancing intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, annually). He looks at arithmetic average returns, geometric average returns, simplified Sharpe ratios and maximum drawdowns of competing portfolios. Using daily stock-returns for over 900 large and liquid U.S. stocks during January 2007 through early 2021, he finds that: (more…)