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Motivated by recent advances in the spectral theory of auto-covariance matrices, we are led to revisit a reformulation of Markowitz' mean-variance portfolio optimization approach in the time domain. In its simplest incarnation it applies to a single traded asset and allows to find an optimal trading strategy which -for a given return -is minimally exposed to market price fluctuations. The model is initially investigated for a range of synthetic price processes, taken to be either second order stationary, or to exhibit second order stationary increments. Attention is paid to consequences of estimating auto-covariance matrices from small finite samples, and auto-covariance matrix cleaning strategies to mitigate against these are investigated. Finally we apply our framework to real world data.

We find a remarkable agreement between the statistics of a randomly divided interval and the observed statistical patterns and distributions found in horse racing betting markets. We compare the distribution of implied winning odds, the average true winning probabilities, the implied odds conditional on a win, and the average implied odds of the winning horse with the corresponding quantities from the "randomly broken stick problem". We observe that the market is at least to some degree informationally efficient. From the mapping between exponential random variables and the statistics of the random division we conclude that horses' true winning abilities are exponentially distributed.

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