This research was initiated by our collaboration with a financial institution whose objective was the construction of fundof-funds
responding to specific industry requirements. The first contribution of this paper is the derivation of the new VaR
Black-Litterman FoF model for the construction of fund-of-funds targeting an absolute return strategy. In order to circumvent
or at least alleviate the problems associated with the estimation risk, the asset returns are approximated through
the combination of the market equilibrium based returns and the opinions of experts by using the Black-Litterman approach.
Moreover, the resulting vector of estimated returns is implicitly assumed to be stochastic by the VaR constraint,
which prescribes the construction of a FoF having an expected return not falling below -5 or -10%, with a probability at
least equal to 95%. The model also accounts for the handling of specific trading constraints and takes the form of a very
complex stochastic integer programming problem.
The second contribution is the derivation of deterministic equivalent or approximations for the VaR Black-Litterman
model. We further show that, for a wide range of probability distributions, those deterministic reformulations are convex,
which is critical for the computational tractability, the numerical solution of the problem, and for the use of the proposed
model to asset universe comprising a large number of possible investment vehicles. The approximations of the deterministic
equivalents are obtained through the use of the Cantelli, the one-sided symmetric Chebychev, and the Camp-Meidell
probability inequalities, and their tightness depends on the assumed properties of the probability distribution of the fundof-funds
return.