This afternoon, I will start a crash course on financial portfolio optimization, with application in R. This week, we start with simple things, with the theoretical setup, without and with a risk free asset. We will discuss then the problem of estimating parameters, in a robust way. Then we introduce the idea of consider a more general criteria to quantify risk than the variance (but it means more general distributions… this point will be discussed further next time). The slides are available here, and R codes from there (in a Markdown)