The shrink parameter (λ) controls how much the EWMA sample
correlation matrix CEWMA is regularised before being
passed to the linear solver. The shrunk matrix is:
where In is the n x n identity matrix. Setting λ = 1 uses the raw EWMA correlation matrix (no shrinkage); setting λ = 0 replaces it entirely with the identity (positions become purely signal-proportional, uncorrelated).
When the number of assets n is large relative to the lookback window T (high concentration ratio n/T), the sample covariance matrix is poorly estimated. Extreme eigenvalues amplify estimation noise and cause the linear solver to allocate excessive leverage to a few eigendirections. Shrinkage toward the identity damps these extremes, improves the condition number, and produces more stable, diversified positions.
corr lookback shorter than 100 days.mu).
Both vola and corr are span-equivalent EWMA
lookbacks (in trading periods). The EWMA decay factor is
a = 2 / (span + 1), giving a centre-of-mass of
span / 2 periods. corr must be >= vola
to ensure the correlation estimator sees at least as much history as the
volatility normaliser.
Ledoit, O. & Wolf, M. (2004).
A well-conditioned estimator for large-dimensional covariance matrices.
Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 88(2), 365-411.
Chen, Y., Wiesel, A., Eldar, Y. C., & Hero, A. O. (2010).
Shrinkage Algorithms for MMSE Covariance Estimation.
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 58(10), 5016-5029.
See also: basanos.math._signal.shrink2id for the implementation.