Abstract: Multi-period portfolio evaluation is a hot topic in financial studies. By taking transaction costs into consideration, a multi-period portfolio optimization model is proposed. Based on the real frontier, the definition of multi-period portfolio efficiency and the corresponding nonlinear model are constructed. Due to the lack of analytical solutions of frontier and difficulties in solving the nonlinear model, it is proved that the true portfolio frontier is concave, and then DEA model is used to approximate the frontier and estimate the efficiencies of multi-period portfolios with transaction costs. The validity of the proposed method is illustrated by simulation in the end.

Key words: multi-period portfolios, transaction costs, performance evaluation, data envelopment analysis