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

The best quant mashup links for the week ending Saturday, 09/19 as voted by our readers: Hacking the Random Walk Hypothesis [Turing Finance] Getting Started: Building a Fully Automated Trading System [Quants Portal] Interview with Euan Sinclair [EP Chan] Interview with Dr Ernest Chan [Factor Wave]

In this post we look at the backtest results of selling a one-lot, at-the-money (ATM) straddle on the S&P 500 Index (SPX), initiated at 38 days-to-expiration (DTE). In this third post of five on 38 DTE straddles, we look at trades that use the same loss exits as shown in the first post, and in

I have been a big fan of options trader and author Euan Sinclair for a long time. I have cited his highly readable and influential book Option Trading in my own work, and it is always within easy reach from my desk. His more recent book Volatility Trading is another must-read. I ran into him at the

Today’s article is an update on this oldie but goodie. When people ask me if momentum investing “works”, at this point – because I am older and (even) crankier than I used to be – I typically refer them to the linked article above and grunt “decide for yourself.” Sorry, it’s just my

This past year we examined the possibility of replicating commodity exposure via equities. The project was spurred by an insightful research report from MSCI, which showed some impressive results. Other research outfits have proposed similar concepts. The figure below, taken from the MSCI report,

In this post we look at the backtest results of selling a one-lot, at-the-money (ATM) straddle on the S&P 500 Index (SPX), initiated at 38 days-to-expiration (DTE). In this second post of five on 38 DTE straddles, we look at trades that use the same loss exits as shown in the first post, and in

This week on the podcast I have algorithmic trader, Kevin Davey. Who like many guests in the past, he comes from a background in engineering – there’s something about these engineers, they seem to make really great traders… After getting off to a bumpy start 25 years ago, Kevin has come a very

First draft of an introduction to the "Javascript for Financial Analysts" book. ~ The humble spreadsheet is the workhorse of the finance industry. Every financial analyst has spent hours, preparing complex spreadsheets, only for an error to creep in here or there. The spreadsheet is a gift

Dr Ernie Chan does something difficult well: he explains quantitative trading ideas to retail traders without over-simplifying them. He has written two books," Quantitative Trading:How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business" and "Algorithmic Trading: Winning Strategies and

The NFL is back!!! Unfortunately, the Eagles may need a new kicker…and now we have to listen to Wes talk trash about the Cowboys victory around the office. Tragic! In the spirit of the new NFL season, I figured it was a good time to highlight a newer paper titled “Corporate Sport Sponsorship and

This post will deal with applying the constant-volatility procedure written about by Barroso and Santa Clara in their paper "Momentum Has Its Moments". The last two posts dealt with evaluating the intelligence of the signal-generation process. While the strategy showed itself to be

My previous post The Health of Stock Mean Reversion: Dead, Dying or Doing Just Fine generated good reader’s suggestions on other ways to check on mean reversion health. Let us see what these tests tell us. The Base Test Date Range: 1/1/1995 to 6/30/2015. Entry: Stock is part of the Russell 1000

SPX closed at a 10-day high on Tuesday. New short-term (and intermediate-term) highs will sometimes get traders excited. When the market is in long-term downtrend mode, this excitement is often misplaced. Way back in a blog post on 4/3/09 I showed a number of “systems” that looked to sell short

I. Trading Strategy Developer: Toby Crabel (ORBP: Opening Range Breakout Preference); Richard D. Donchian (Price Channel Filter). Source: Crabel, T. (1990). Day Trading with Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout. Greenville: Traders Press, Inc. Concept: Volatility expansion with a

Usign 9 equity markets I talked about in the previous post, I’m going to compare «avoid death cross» or «moving average crossover» market timing rule with vanilla B&H. Formal specification of the rules used: — if at day t we have for some index that MA(10) — if at day t we have for

Hackers would make great traders. At a meta level, hackers and traders do the same thing: they find and exploit the weaknesses of a system. The difference is that hackers hack computers, networks, and even people for various good and bad reasons whereas traders hack financial markets to make

In the previous set of articles (Parts 1, 2 and 3) we went into significant detail about the AR(p), MA(q) and ARMA(p,q) linear time series models. We used these models to generate simulated data sets, fitted models to recover parameters and then applied these models to financial equities data. In

Authors: Breedon, Rime, Vitale Title: Carry Trades, Order Flow and the Forward Bias Puzzle Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2643531 Abstract: We investigate the relation between foreign exchange (FX) order flow and the forward bias. We outline a decomposition of the forward

This is the first article in a series where we will look at the performance of selling at-the-money (ATM) options straddles. For background on the setup for the backtests, as well as the nomenclature used in the charts and tables below, please see the introductory article for this series: Option

Robust Gaussian Filtering

For the last 6 months I have been focused on the process of building the full technology stack of an automated trading system. I have come across many challenges and learnt a great deal about the two different methods of backtesting (Vectorised and Event driven). In my journey to building an event

In pair trading, usually a pair of stocks is traded in a market neutral strategy, i.e. it doesn’t matter whether market is trending upwards or downwards, the two open positions for each stock hedge against each other. To be able to pair trade, the key challenges are to: Choose a pair which will

In my previous post I demonstrated how a risk parity portfolio could be calculated numerically using a Newton method. However, the more common problem is to be able to set risk budget constraints as opposed to having equal risk. We can do this with PCTR constrained optimization by setting PCTR

"Taking less risk than is optimal is not safer; it just locks in a worse outcome. Taking more risk than is optimal also results in a worse outcome, and often leads to complete disaster." -- Aaron Brown, Red Blooded Risk (2011) In our new white paper, we explore how tactical strategies can

The best quant mashup links for the week ending Saturday, 09/12 as voted by our readers: Book Review: DIY Financial Advisor: A Simple Solution to Build and Protect Your Wealth [Dual Momentum] Hypothesis-Driven Development Part II [QuantStrat TradeR] Trend Followers Make Forecasts [Price Action Lab]

Today is the big day. My book Systematic Trading - A unique new method for designing trading and investing systems is officially released (although some people who ordered the ebook may already be reading it). Here is a picture of my new "baby": Even in this age of technology there is

k-Shape: Efficient and Accurate Clustering of Time Series

Factor analysis has taken the professional consultant world by storm and we are slowly seeing this analysis being used more and more by sophisticated retail investors and investment advisors. And that’s great–factor analysis is a great tool. In fact, we discuss the use of the tool and how it is

I've been thinking more about technical analysis. Not so much how to do it, but more about what it actually is. Some of it can be tested scientifically, but a lot can't (for more on this distinction refer to the excellent book by David Aronson, "Evidence-Based Technical Analysis:

Scott’s Investments provides a free “Dual ETF Momentum” spreadsheet which was originally created in February 2013. The strategy was inspired by a paper written by Gary Antonacci and available on Optimal Momentum. Antonacci’s book, Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher

This post will show how to use Monte Carlo to test for signal intelligence. Although I had rejected this strategy in the last post, I was asked to do a monte-carlo analysis of a thousand random portfolios to see how the various signal processes performed against said distribution. Essentially, the

In this blog post, I will present some backtest results on volatility models. The list I present here are not exhaustive and there are still a gargantuan set of papers focusing on this issue (a good place to start is on vlab [s.o to @neighbourlybear for showing me this]). In the next section, I

Nobody can deny a simple empirical fact: higher fees are associated with lower returns, on average (Here is a great paper by Ken French on the costs of active investing). This finding, logically, leads investors to focus on low-cost solutions as opposed to high-cost solutions, all else equal. But do

Yesterday I discussed Tuesday’s Follow Through Day (FTD) and some possible implication based on breadth and volume statistics. Wednesday was interesting because we saw a big selloff immediately follow Tuesday’s FTD. Past occurrences of this have been somewhat rare, but also somewhat suggestive

Officially end my exams on 28 Aug 15. Since I started a year back, I have learnt so much about finance, although I still think it’s not enough. In my opinion, I think there are 2 main school of thoughts in finance. One track is about trying to come out with models and price a certain financial

Its somewhat shocking to think about, but the mathematical underpinnings of modern finance have existed since at least 1898 when an obscure french mathematician Louis Bachelier was first getting started on what would become known as random walks. The two centuries prior to Bachelier witnessed the

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

Using a large dataset of news releases, we study instances of investors’ mistaken reaction, or misreaction, to news. We define misreaction as stock prices moving in the direction opposite to the news when it is released. We find that news tone predicts returns in the cross-section only upon the

One notable bit of evidence that emerged on Tuesday was the fact that it qualified as an IBD Follow Through Day (FTD). I have done a lot of research on FTDs over the years. Much of that research can be found on the blog. Here is a link. http://quantifiableedges.com/category/ibd-follow-through-day/ A

This post will evaluate signals based on the rank regression hypotheses covered in the last post. The last time around, we saw that rank regression had a very statistically significant result. Therefore, the next step would be to evaluate the basic signals — whether or not there is statistical

Jesse Livermore of the always interesting Philosophical Economics outlines the case for writing puts in his recent post The World’s Best Investment For the Next 12 Months. Given this has been an area of focus for me professionally for the better part of the last 5 years (sneak preview... I love

In a situation where you wish to determine the returns on an investment, one may have all the expertise to do this but without certain information (missing pieces) it would not be possible to derive to a conclusive figure. In practical terms “assume you have the value of all returns of all assets

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF “SPY” fell more than 6% in August Measured against other monthly returns, August 2015 was the worst month since 2012 “Monthly” returns are arbitrary and skew our understanding of market moves Since 2012, there have been several -6%, or near -6%, return periods