Quant Mashup - Alphaism Leveraged ETF – A Simulation [Alphaism]This post is a token of appreciation for Faisal Habib who taught us structured products this summer. As commonly known among people who are familiar with leveraged ETFs, the tracking error of those products tend to be larger than what we intuitively expected. This phenomenon has been explored and(...) Ex-ante and Ex-post Risk Model – An Empirical Test [Alphaism]Whenever constructing a quant portfolio or managing portfolio risk, the risk model is at the heart of the process. A risk model, usually estimated with a sample covariance matrix, has 3 typical issues. Not positive-definite, which means…[not invertible] Exposed to extreme values in the sample,(...) An Empirical Mean Reversion Test on VIX Futures [Alphaism]VIX mean reversion trade gets popular when the market experiences big ups and downs. You hear a lot of talks about how much money people make from trading VXX, XIV and their leveraged equivalents. However, is VIX truly mean reverting, or it seems more lucrative than it is just because people only(...) Constructing an Alpha Portfolio with Factor Tilts [Alphaism]In this post I’d like to show an example of constructing a monthly-rebalanced long-short portfolio to exploit alpha signals while controlling for factor exposures. This example covers the time period between March 2005 and 2014. I use 477 stocks from S&P500 universe (data source: Quandl) and(...) Non-linear Twists in Stock & Bond Correlation [Alphaism]Stocks and bonds are negatively correlated. Translation: they must move against each other most of the time. Because intuitively, stocks bear higher risk than bonds so investors go to stocks when they want to take more risks and flee to bonds when they feel a storm is coming. Plus the numbers tell(...)