Authors’ abstract: We study utility maximization problems for general utility functions using the dynamic programming approach. An incomplete financial market model is considered, where the dynamics of asset prices is described by an \(\mathbb R^d\)-valued continuous semimartingale. Under some regularity assumptions, we derive the backward stochastic partial differential equation related directly to the primal problem and show that the strategy is optimal if and only if the corresponding wealth process satisfies a certain forward stochastic differential equation. The cases of power, exponential and logarithmic utilities are considered as examples.