Portfolios with nonlinear constraints and spin glasses

In a recent paper Galluccio, Bouchaud and potters demonstrated that a certain portfolio problem with a nonlinear constraint maps exactly onto finding the ground states of a long-range spin glass, with the concomitant nonuniqueness and instability of the optimal portfolios. Here we put forward geometric arguments that lead to qualitatively similar conclusions, without recourse to the methods of spin glass theory, and give two more examples of portfolio problems with convex nonlinear constraints, (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.