The term "black swan" has become synonymous with "rare event" – but the original concept proposed by Nassim Taleb was a bit more nuanced. The term came from the latin phrase "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno": a rare bird in the lands and very much like a

Welcome back to Interviewing the Quants. This will be the second interview in the series. Many of you might know our guest from his trading at Nightly Patterns (http://nightlypatterns.wordpress.com). His name is Marco Simioni and he’s agreed to give us greater insight into what he does and who he

I’ve been analyzing a 60/40 US stock/bond portfolio in R in a series of posts and today’s installment picks up from the previous post by adding a global strategy. The goal is enhancing the 60/40’s return while keeping risk at a comparable if not lesser level. Overly ambitious? Perhaps, but

Our Asset Allocation Backtesting Tool is Live! You can build and backest your own allocation portfolio using our "Allocation Architect" tool. How to Access the Tool? Step 1: Click "Our tools" tab from our main website page. 1.1 Click to enlarge. Step 2: If you already have a

If you currently use a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel for data analysis, you might be interested in taking a look at this tutorial on how to transition from Excel to R by Tony Ojeda. The tutorial explains how to use R functions in place of Excel formulas, including tools like =AVERAGE and

US News laundry lists their top 10 "Value Investing Funds," or Value Investing ETFs, in their recent article: http://money.usnews.com/funds/etfs/rankings/value-funds The criteria (and weighting) for selecting so-called "Value" ETFs are outlined below: Expense Ratio (30%) Tracking

We construct a strategy based on a single indicator – percentage of close price within the range of [Past N days Low, Past N days High]. First we calculate the indicator (pBand variable below) require(quantmod) getSymbols('SPY') Lookback=10 HLC=SPY[,c(

In this article I describe the Gator Oscillator and how it can be used as part of a pyramid entry trading system. I show the results of a Gator trading strategy on the S&P500 Index from 2000-2015. Pyramid Entry Systems It is tough to find good trades. In most markets at most times there will

In his latest book (Algorithmic Trading: Winning Strategies and their Rationale, Wiley, 2013) Ernie Chan does an excellent job of setting out the procedures for developing statistical arbitrage strategies using cointegration. In such mean-reverting strategies, long positions are taken in

Last week, CNBC profiled the inspirational story of Ronald Read, a gas station attendant and janitor from Vermont who amassed an $8MM fortune simply by investing portions of his small salary into high-quality, dividend-paying U.S. equities. Given the sampling of names that Read is reported to have

We’re proud to announce, thanks to the support of the community, the LEAN Algorithmic Trading Engine is now 100% open source. You have the freedom to connect any data source, execute through any brokerage and design any algorithm 100% locally. Moment of our Open Sourcing, Jan 12th 2015 It’s an

Posted by - Sanz Prophet Historically and up to 2013, equities have exhibited a positive bias during the end of the month. Here is an example of buying the SPY etf on the first down-day after the 23rd and selling on the first up-day of the next month. Trading is at the same day close.

Given yesterday’s post showing the link between trading volume and stock valuation, it would seem appropriate to investigate the ways in which we can predict today’s volume. Its all well and good to know that high volume coincides with volatility and falling prices but how do we know we are

This post introduces the Quarterly Tactical Strategy, introduced by Cliff Smith on a Seeking Alpha article. It presents a variation on the typical dual-momentum strategy that only trades over once a quarter, yet delivers a seemingly solid risk/return profile. The article leaves off a protracted

Executive Summary: Dual Momentum, a concept pioneered by Gary Antonacci, intelligently combines elements of two types of momentum investing strategies -- absolute and relative momentum -- into a comprehensive asset allocation system. His paper shows that the combination of time-series momentum and

The first day of S&P 500 February expiration week has been up in four of the last five years. This is a respectable streak, but still short of the 12-year winning streak that lasted from 1994 to 2005. Nonetheless, the first trading day of option expiration week is clearly bullish with S&P

New highs, but with an asterisk? $QQQ

It is notable is that Friday is the last day before the President’s Day holiday. Historically the Friday before President’s Day has been a poor performer. But more recently the downside edge has not persisted. This can be seen in the curve below.

A great advantage of dual momentum is the low number of parameters (typically only a lookback length of 12 months is used). This reduces the likelihood that results are curve-fitted or uncovered by data-mining and subsequently useless in real-time trading. … Continue reading U

Many traders use technical and/or fundamental data, but few traders have discovered the unique benefits of using sentiment data in their investment process. Sentiment data attempts to quantify the emotional mood of investors and traders and can be used as a very effective contra-indicator. When

This article concerns the daily returns for the FTSE 100 Index from 1984. Average daily returns The following table shows the average return since 1984 of the FTSE 100 Index for each day of the year. For example, over the last 31 years the average daily return for the FTSE 100 Index on 2 January has

Page 88 of the Stock Trader’s Almanac 2015, points out that Presidents’ Day is the poorest performing holiday of the eight holidays that are tracked. Unlike the others, the trading day before and the trading day after this three-day holiday weekend are both down on average over the past 34

We decompose the abnormal profi…ts associated with well-known patterns in the cross-section of expected returns into their overnight and intraday components. We show that, on average, all of the abnormal returns on momentum strategies remarkably occur overnight while the abnormal profi…ts on the

“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” ― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum Back in the days when I still thought markets were driven by fundamentals I used

In the last several posts, I introduced some different methods for channel strategies including Percentile Channels. A simple way to potentially improve (or at least take a different approach) to a donchian channel strategy is to use a different price input to generate trading signals. As stated in

Small Trader Pessimism bodes well for stocks $SPY

Most recently there has been a lot of chatter and discussion in the financial blogosphere regarding the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX®) soaring higher since December 5, 2014 when the index closed at its preliminary low of 11.82 (the index closed at 22.39 on January 15, 2015), despite the fact that the

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 has a new book out, Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for

Over the years silver has peaked in February, most notably so in 1980 when the Hunt Brothers’ plot to corner the silver market was foiled. Our seasonal analysis shows that going short on or about February 20 and holding until about April 25 has worked 32 times in the last 42 years for a win

Recent articles that I found interesting and made me think. S&P 500 Snapshot: Check out the ‘A Perspective on Drawdowns’ to see how shallow drawdowns have been overall since 2009. This Is The Best Illustration Of History’s Bull And Bear Markets We’ve Seen Yet – A longer term look at

As part of the Festival of Traders I will be presenting a webinar on Wednesday at 5:30pm EST with much of my Fed Day research in focus. Click here for more information and to register for the event.

Book to price is a bad value factor. It is a decent stock selection factor overall, but relative to the other ways of measuring value (earnings to price, cash flow to price, EBITDA/EV, etc) it is sub par. I've been interested lately in very concentrated value portfolios, and found it

I have implemented 4 bitcoin exchange interfaces now that produce a live L3 stream of orderbook updates + trades of the form: Screen Shot 2015-02-10 at 6.33.12 PM Given the above, can reconstitute the orderbook as it moves through time, and can likewise be used to creat

The primary driver of long-horizon wealth is expected returns. Why would you invest in anything but stocks? Why isn’t your portfolio 100% stocks? Do you believe stocks are going to have the highest return? By the way, stocks have averaged 10% a year for a long period of time. Bonds have averaged

Transports Slipping $IYT

A frequent point of conversation that we have at Newfound – both internally and with advisors – is the role of volatility as a measure of risk. On the one hand, from a statistical point of view, higher volatility implies a greater potential magnitude of loss. On the other hand, investors are

The geometric Brownian motion model allows you to generate a series of prices for an asset. It is a type of stochastic process that follows a Brownian motion path with a drift. Stochastic processes are a concept from probability theory which are used to model the change in a seemingly random process

Utilities relative strength top? $XLU

This post is a continuation of the prior post. I will show the backtest results for dynamic exits of 38 days-to-expiration (DTE) Iron Condors (IC), with 8 delta short strikes, with different profit and loss exits as a percentage of the initial credit. For some background on how these results are

This post will demonstrate the PELT algorithm from the changepoint package–a competing algorithm to the twitter package’s breakout detection algorithm. While neither of these algorithms produce satisfactory results, one change point location approximation algorithm that makes no distributional

nvestors trying to make decisions on how to invest their savings face many complications that are frequently ignored in research papers on asset allocation. Often, it is assumed that a fixed lump sum of money is invested. But this is rarely the case in real world investing for the individual

I’ve previously touched on the use of social media analytics as one useful measure of investor sentiment. It does occur to me that it might be interesting to explore a particular source of such analytics. This could be of service by making the concepts more tangible and by illustrating the growth

This article looks at the monthly seasonality in the price of crude oil (West Texas Intermediate, WTI). From 1986 The following chart shows the average price change by month of WTI for the period 1986-2014. For example, since 1986 the price of WTI has increased on average 0.5% in January.

In the first part of this three-part series, What Drives Real GDP Growth?, I identified four themes which drive real GDP growth. These themes are based on 19 socioeconomic indicators whose average Spearman and Pearson correlations to real GDP growth were statistically significant and greater than

I actually received a large volume of what could best be chararcterized as “hate mail” for one of the previous posts on percentile channels. In reading these comments I was reminded of Jimmy Kimmel’s funny segments where celebrities read mean tweets about themselves. While I did not publish

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

We have already shown before how to set up CUDA in both Windows and Linux environment and how to create a simple project. Today we will demonstrate how easy it is to perform a simple Monte Carlo simulation using Thrust library. We will do so by estimating π with random numbers. From the

Based on psychology theory, we propose that intuition can be a key element stimulating auditor skepticism, whereas overreliance on analytical processing can overwhelm auditors’ intuition thereby reducing skepticism. We test our expectations with an experiment containing responses from 85 senior

Time to consider Materials Leadership? $XLB

Some trading strategies make intuitive sense. Other trading strategies do not. With some trading strategies it is possible to articulate some logical reason or reasons regarding why they might be expected to work well over time. With others trading strategies, well, not so much.