Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/ii/paper-1/30k/d/solution

Condition on the information available before time . The current wealth is then fixed, while is independent of that information. Put
For any portfolio , use the inner product induced by the positive-definite matrix to write
The linear image of a multivariate normal vector shows that the two portfolio returns are jointly normal, and
Thus independence of uncorrelated jointly normal variables makes the residual return independent of the aligned return; it also has expected value zero.
The continuation value is concave by part (c). Conditional Jensen inequality therefore shows that adding the independent centered residual cannot improve the objective:
where . Since the optimal portfolio is unique, its residual must be zero.
It remains to determine the sign. If , the portfolios and have the same return variance, namely , while their means are and . The latter return has the distribution of the former plus the positive constant . Since is increasing, replacing by cannot reduce the objective, contradicting uniqueness. Hence .
Applying this conditional argument at every time gives nonnegative, past-measurable random variables such that
This is the Gaussian one-fund theorem.

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