Mean-variance portfolio selection with random investment horizon

Abstract

This paper studies a continuous-time securities market where an agent, having a random investment horizon and a targeted terminal mean return, seeks to minimize the variance of a portfolio's return. Two situations are discussed, namely a deterministic time-varying density process and a stochastic density process. In contrast to [18], the variance of an investment portfolio is no longer minimal when all assets are invested in a risk-free security. Furthermore, the random investment horizon has a material effect on the efficient frontier. This provides some insights into the classical mutual fund theorem.