I have some familiarity with the Markowitz model, but certainly not as much as you do about the practical use — could you share notes/articles/talks on the practical use? I’m super interested to learn more.
Read "Advanced portfolio management" by Paleologo (ironically it's actually the introductory one of his two books), or "Active portfolio management" for a more thorough, older, longer book on the topic.
Markowitz isn't really used at all, but Markowitz-like reasoning is used extremely heavily in finance, by which I basically mean factor modelling of various kinds - effectively the result of taking mean-variance as a concept and using some fairly aggressive dimensionality reduction to cope with the problems of financial data, and the fact that one has proprietary views about things ("alpha" and so on)
Black-Litterman model is an example of how to address the shortcoming of unreliable empirical inputs.
You'll also see more ad hoc approaches, such as simulating hypothetical scenarios to determine worst case scenarios.
It's not math heavy. Math heavy is a smell. Expect to see fairly simple monte carlo simulations, but with significant thought put into the assumptions.
