Is it better to run your quant trading in the cloud or locally? In this article, I outline the pros and cons of each approach and explain why running locally is often better for research while running in the cloud is better for live trading. Don't assume the cloud is better It's common to

Market cap and dollar volume are two commonly used metrics for filtering a trading universe by size of security. Does it matter which one you use? In this post, I quantify the difference between market cap and dollar volume and explain the kinds of stocks that may unexpectedly appear in your

Buying high-quality stocks and avoiding low-quality ones can improve investment returns. In this post, I use Alphalens and Zipline to analyze the Piotroski F-Score, a composite measure of a firm's financial health and quality. This post is part of the fundamental factors series, which explores

Are rising interest rates straining balance sheets and increasing the risk of bankruptcies? This article investigates two financial distress factors, the Altman Z-Score and interest coverage ratio, to see if distress is on the rise and how it impacts stock returns. This post is part of the

Sector neutralization is a technique to hedge out sector bets and reduce the impact of sector-specific risks on the portfolio by ranking factors within sectors rather than across sectors. This post uses the debt-to-equity ratio to show why sector neutralization is important and how to perform it in

Backtest speed can significantly affect research friction. The ability to form a hypothesis and quickly get an answer from a backtest allows you to investigate more hypotheses. In this article, I explore several factors that affect backtest speed and compare the performance of 3 open-source

Should investors prefer companies with high profit margins or companies with improving profit margins? Is it better to own an unprofitable company that's getting better, or a profitable company that's getting worse? This post explores these questions by analyzing the profitability growth

How does a company's profitability affect its stock returns? In this post, I use Alphalens, a Python library for analyzing alpha factors, to investigate the relationship between operating margin, a profitability ratio, and future returns. This is the second post in the fundamental factors

When researching fundamental factors, analyzing alpha shouldn't be your first step. You can save time and spot issues early by starting with a basic exploration of your factor's distribution and statistical properties, a process known as exploratory data analysis (EDA). This post looks at

QuantConnect, a quantitative backtesting and trading platform serving mostly retail traders, recently announced a crowdfunding campaign seeking to raise money from its community of users. The company's associated regulatory disclosures (required by the SEC for equity crowdfunding offerings)

What happens after stocks suffer large one-day losses? This post finds that the proverbial "dead cat bounce" occurs overnight and is followed by continued losses the next day. Targeting international markets, I explore a trading strategy that aims to profit from the losses that follow a

What is survivorship bias, and why should you care about it? This post explains how survivorship bias can trick you into drawing faulty conclusions from your research, and what you need to know to avoid being tricked. What is survivorship bias? Equities datasets are said to have survivorship bias if

Quantopian announced that it is shutting down its community platform. This doesn’t entirely come as a surprise. Quantopian returned money to investors earlier this year after its investment strategy underperformed. It shut down paper trading in 2019 (having already ended live trading in 2017),

What happens when strong stocks gap down at the open? A well-known trading strategy is to buy the gap, expecting mean reversion. This post uses Zipline to explore down gaps and finds a profitable strategy based on selling, not buying, the gap. Buy the gap? Buying stocks that gap down is a common

Intraday trading strategies offer great promise as well as great peril. This post explores an intraday trading strategy for crude oil calendar spreads and highlights the impact of transaction costs on its profitability. Background In a previous post, I explored an end-of-day pairs trading strategy

Classic pairs trading strategies have suffered deteriorating returns over time. Can a research pipeline that facilitates the identification and selection of ETF pairs make pairs trading viable again? This post investigates such a pipeline. The problem: pairs wander away Source: Ernie Chan,

Do intraday strategies have a place in the portfolios of long-term investors and fund managers? This post explores an intraday strategy that works best in high volatility regimes and thus makes an attractive candidate for hedging long-term portfolio risk. Trading hypothesis: first half hour predicts

Does forced buying and selling of underlying shares by leveraged ETF sponsors cause predictable intraday price moves? This post explores an intraday momentum strategy based on the premise that it does. Daily rebalancing of leveraged ETFs Source: Ernie Chan, Algorithmic Trading: Winning Strategies

Do businesses exchange currencies in predictable ways that forex traders can exploit? This post explores an intraday EUR.USD strategy based on the hypothesis that businesses cause currencies to depreciate during local business hours and appreciate during foreign business hours. Business patterns in

Many quantitative trading strategies thrive in high volatility regimes, while other trading strategies work best in low volatility regimes. So which global markets are the most and least volatile? This post compares the daily, overnight, and intraday volatility of 17 countries. Methodology Using

If you're a short seller exploring global markets, a good first question to ask is: are there shares available to borrow? This post looks at the percentage of stocks that are shortable through Interactive Brokers in each of 17 countries. Data source Interactive Brokers provides an FTP site with

The US stock market is the largest and most liquid stock market in the world and tends to get all the attention. Many brokers and trading platforms are US-only, and many traders focus exclusively on the US market. This post compares the number of stock listings in each of 17 countries to quantify