Abstract The poor out‐of‐sample performance of mean–variance portfolio model is mainly caused by estimation errors in the covariance matrix and the mean return, especially the mean return vector. Meanwhile, in financial practice, what most investors actually like is to hold a few stocks in their portfolio. The goal of this paper is to propose some new efficient mean–variance portfolio selection models by considering the following aspects: (i) use the L1‐regularization in objective function to obtain sparse portfolio; (ii) use the shrinkage...