Yesterday I wrote up a post, and immediately after, was sure I got something wrong. This is the offending chart. Volatility increases linearly as we add more positions to the equally weighted portfolio. What I failed to mention is that each position was weighted by 100% of the portfolio. So two

The portfolio manager of a large, active dividend fund was recently interviewed by Morningstar. (“What Active Management Can Bring To Dividend Investing” http://www.morningstar.com/cover/videocenter.aspx?id=716392). The portfolio manager argues that simply looking for stocks with high dividend

We will now repeat our experiment with the 900 trend trading strategies, but this time with trades filtered by the Market Meanness Index. In our first experiment we found many profitable strategies, some even with high profit factors, but none of them passed White’s Reality Check. So they all

This paper focuses on momentum strategies based on recent and intermediate past returns of U.S. industry portfolios. Our empirical analysis shows that strategies based on intermediate past returns yield higher mean returns. Moreover, strategies involving both return specifications exhibit

Over the last five blog posts we looked at the backtest results for 4080 options straddles sold on the S&P 500 Index (SPX) at 45 days-to-expiration (DTE). Eight different loss approaches were tested on these straddles. On top of these eight loss approaches, tests were conducted with no profit

The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet track the 10 month moving average signals for two portfolios listed in Mebane Faber’s book The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets. Faber discusses 5, 10, and 20 security portfolios that have trading signals based on long-term

In the post, Maximum Loss Stops: Do you really need them?, we looked at how maximum loss stops changed the results of a mean reversion strategy. At the end of the post I asked the readers to vote for what to try next. Let us see how these are ideas turn out. The rules from the original post Setup

I wrote last week that many different measures of risk can be used to demonstrate that low risk stocks outperform high risk stocks, and illustrated this by sorting stocks according to the Hurst exponent. Today we are going to offer another example of this by using entropy as the measure of risk. The

This is a brief post aimed at those who have already bought a copy of "Systematic Trading" (by the way thanks!) As you've probably noticed I've included excel sheets here explaining the two trading rules I describe in the book - exponentially weighted moving average crossover

I recently enrolled in the QuantInsti Executive Program in Algorithmic Trading and one of the areas in quantitative finance that interests me greatly is the analysis of financial time series. During the course we will take on a massive project to build our own trading strategy with the help of a

Months ago I came up with an idea. How about building a portfolio where choosing positions and a holding period is interchangeable? Weird right? Let me explain. Academics assume day over day returns have little to do with each other and that markets are more or less efficient. So increasing your

Robert Carver introduces his 2015 book, Systematic Trading: A Unique New Method for Designing Trading and Investing Systems, by stating that: “I don’t believe there is any magic system that will automatically make you huge profits, and you should be wary of anyone who says otherwise, especially

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) has been widely called into question in the investment literature, through two main anomalies: timing and low-volatility anomalies. In this paper, we aim to combine the predictive power of timing and low-volatility strategies to deliver better risk-adjusted

The WSJ blog had a recent article The VIX Market Suggests It’s Not Yet Time to Buy the Dips outlining: Typically, longer-dated VIX futures are more expensive than VIX futures expiring in the current month, as there’s a greater chance of stock swings over a longer time period. That makes for a an

We just love a good debate, and there seems to be quite a heated debate at the moment about the relative utility of passive versus active investing. Perhaps this debate is as timeless as investment management itself, but a flurry of recent studies may have finally armed passive advocates with enough

As noted through our previous posts, we are big proponents of Value investing and Momentum investing strategies. We even highlight the best way to combine value and momentum. However, there is a new paper by Toby Moskowitz titled “Asset Pricing and Sports Betting” which examines how size, value

Summary We often hear trend following being referred to as “market timing” In all active strategies, timing is an important concept Market timing is a distinct process whereby investors try to predict the future Momentum is reactionary, not predictive, and is therefore no more a form of market

Approach to Designing Amazing Strategies “Add a SMA(30)! No add an EMA(18). Optimise it to find the best parameter value. Ok we’ll stick to EMA(15). Throw in 3 date and time filters, 3 optimised price indicators and 3 volume indicators (that are essentially saying the same thing in different

Robert Carver is an independent systematic trader, freelance writer and research consultant. He spent more than seven years working for AHL, one of the worlds largest systematic hedge funds. Robert was responsible for the inception of AHL's fundamental strategies group and subsequently managed

Michael Edesses is out with a scathing article lambasting the field of empirical finance. He draws inspiration from Harvey, Liu and Zhu's (HLZ) recent article, entitled "…and the Cross Section of Expected Returns", but extends HLZ's conclusions to an absurd limit. In this

Wow, I enjoyed replicating this neatly written paper by Ronald Hochreiter. Ronald is an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Institute for Statistics and Mathematics). In his paper he applies evolutionary optimization techniques to compute optimal rule-based

Following on from my last post I thought I would, as a first step, code up a "straightforward" Runge-Kutta function and show how to deal with the fact that there is no "magic mathematical formula" to calculate the slopes that are an integral part of Runge-Kutta. My approach is to

Momentum and Risk Adjustment

Market Condition and Momentum

Extreme Events in Stock Market Fundamental Factors

Measuring Multiscaling in Financial Time Series

Understanding Systematic Risk: A High-Frequency Approach

The best quant mashup links for the week ending Saturday, 09/26 as voted by our readers: Sorry Jim, trend following probably still works (though not the fast stuff) [Investment Idiocy] Sorry Bob But Jim Simons is Probably Laughing At Your T-Statistics [Price Action Lab] Hypothesis-Driven Development

I want a strategy that is able to choose the assets that makes it look like an index Yt. -Then take the ones most correlated to it. -Ok, but look: CC1 The Xt and the Xt+c series have exactly the same correlation with Yt -I prefer Xt+c!! -Yes, but I am trying to be very similar to Yt and Xt+c have a

In my last post I had a bit of a controversial pop at a brilliant and successful billionaire hedge fund manager; Jim Simons. In continuing my futile quest to raise the level of debate in the quantitative investment community I thought I'd have a go at another clever and very wealthy guy, Cliff

At the end of August 2015 the 50-day moving average of the S&P500 crossed its 200-day moving average to the downside – the 33rd occurrence of a “Death Cross” since 1950. The performance of the S&P500 was investigated for periods ranging from one year before to two years after a Death

As stated in my previous post I have been focusing on getting some meaningful features as possible inputs to my machine learning based trading system, and one of the possible ideas that has caught my attention is using Runge-Kutta methods to project ( otherwise known as "guessing" ) future

This post will demonstrate a stop-loss rule inspired by Andrew Lo’s paper “when do stop-loss rules stop losses”? Furthermore, it will demonstrate how to deflate a Sharpe ratio to account for the total number of trials conducted, which is presented in a paper written by David H. Bailey and

There is plenty of evidence that stocks with low volatility have better subsequent performance. There is also plenty of evidence that stocks with low beta outperform. Other studies have shown that low downside deviation and skewness are also predictive of good returns. None of these measures are

Andreas Clenow is CIO of Zurich-based ACIES Asset Management ($300+ million AuM), and author of 'Stocks on the Move: Beating the Market with Hedge Fund Momentum Strategies'. Why would he give up the super secret sauce in a tell-all? Automated Trader finds out. CTAsHedge Funds Andreas

The first chapter ended with code which included a map and a filter which we will dive back into now with a less applied more intuitive example. Open up the JavaScript console and paste or type in the following code, [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] .filter( function(j){ return j%2===1; } ); This code filters

In one of the previous posts I considered market timing with moving averages on 9 quite different equity indices that were chosen in other post, and came to the conclusion that the rule is the viable alternative to the standard B&H, allowing to avoid large drawdowns in one cases and even improve

Machine learning is a powerful tool for not only coming up with new strategies (like we do in TRAIDE) but also for improving your existing strategies. In this article, we’ll cover adjusting your position size using a random forest algorithm and turning your strategy on an off using a Hidden Markov

irst draft of 'JavaScript for Financial Analysts' Chapter 2. ~ Most bankers, whether they admit it or not are really high tech plumbers. They receive data; process it; and send it on to a fancy risk or aggregation system. Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) takes up an inordinate amount of

#38 - Accrual Anomaly Authors: Patatoukas Title: Asymmetrically Timely Loss Recognition and the Accrual Anomaly Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2653979 Abstract: Conditionally conservative accounting practices mandate the more timely recognition of losses relative to gains

Back in May, I posted A Guide to Creating Your Own Hedge Fund outlining how the application of momentum to the two worst performing funds within the Morningstar Multialternative category over the previous ten years would have provided an investor with better risk-adjusted returns than the Barclays

In this article I show that very basic quantitative trading strategies that generate returns from different market behaviours, when combined, can provide a more desirable and stable returns stream, as reflected in a Sharpe ratio higher than any individual strategy. We show how absolute returns can

In this article we are going to consider the famous Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity model of order p,q, also known as GARCH(p,q). GARCH is used extensively within the financial industry as many asset prices are conditional heteroskedastic. We will be discussing conditional

Summary Trend-following can be used as an objective methodology to seek to participate with market growth and protect against significant declines Common models may work on average but can fail in very specific scenarios Parabolic moves are particularly tough for simple trend following methods to

There is an interesting discussion in the geeky world of academic finance literature between the intellectual muscle at AQR and academia. aqr versus the academics on active share The discussion revolves around the following question: “Does Active Share matter?” This is an important topic for

Impact of Proliferation of Automated Trading Systems and Technology on Financial Markets With the advent of automated trading everything has become computerized. Risk management takes a whole new level in this technologically fast paced world. The trends in day-to-day trading have been changing.

There was lots of action in financial markets last week, with much of the attention focused on the U.S. Federal Reserve. The interest rate on a 10-year U.S. Treasury bond edged up 10 basis points early in the week in anticipation that the Fed might finally raise its target for the short-term

This post is about copulas and heavy tails. In a previous post we discussed the concept of correlation structure. The aim is to characterize the correlation across the distribution. Prior to the global financial crisis many investors were under the impression that they were diversified, and they

First draft of 'Javascript for Financial Analysts' Chapter 1. ~ Much of our coding time is spent in an interactive environment, colloquially called the 'REPL', 'Read-Eval-Print Loop' or console. The REPL reads input, evaluates it according to our code and prints it.

Like it’s bullish counterpart, the hammer, this bearish reversal pattern has been inconsistent in its forecasting abilities, except under certain conditions. We’ve covered the “hammer” candlestick chart pattern on a couple occasions over the past few years, most extensively in this October