Portfolio diversification in the sovereign credit swap markets

We develop models for portfolio diversification in the sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) markets and show that, despite literature findings that sovereign CDS spreads are affected by global factors, there is sufficient idiosyncratic risk to be diversified. However, we identify regime switching in the times series of CDS spreads and spread returns, and the optimal diversified strategies can be regime dependent. The developed models trade off the CVaR risk measure against expected return, consistently with the statistical properties of spreads. We consider three investment strategies suited for different CDS market participants: for investors with long positions, speculators that hold unco…