I've been thinking about applying factor analysis to commodity futures. People have studied this idea but commodity factors have not been studied to the same degree as equity factors. This is to be expected. Stocks are parts of companies and there are many commonalities between the operations

Research into the determinants of fixed-income returns have found that a number of stock and bond market risk factors can be shown to demonstrate explanatory power beyond the standard term-structure variables. Ivelina Pavlova, Ann Marie Hibbert, Joel Barber and Krishnan Dandapani—authors of the

In general, investors focused on affordable stocks with strong fundamentals have been taken to the cleaners year-to-date. Meanwhile, expensive stocks with poor fundamentals have been rocking! Some Basic Statistics: Below we document some core performance figures using Ken French’s data on

The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 highlighted the importance of downside risk management. Many managers that protected capital during this period saw their AUM balloon. Some of these same managers underperformed in the post-crisis years. This underperformance should be anything but surprising. We

In my previous article I went over how to add a position sizing rule and in this one I will complete homework exercise 2: adding a stop loss and trailing stop loss. Adding a stop loss in R is way easier than building it into Excel, I had to think for some time as to how I was going to break it down

This week we received an email from an advisor that echoes some calls we’ve been receiving lately. We thought it would make a great topic for us to cover in our commentary this week. The email read: We’re seeing a lot of negative indicators in the market right now, and seeing commentary from

Having just written and, thankfully, passed the CFA Level I exam I wanted to take this opportunity to share my experience writing the CFA Level I exam given that I come from an unconventional academic background and work in the industry as a quantitative analyst. I also want to share some helpful

Perhaps the most widely known form of statistical arbitrage is called Pairs Trading. In this general strategy, we start first by picking two stocks which are highly related to one another (either by correlation, cointegration, or both). One method for finding such pairs is to use a network graph

Last week we had a fairly long post on a valuation based asset allocation strategy that might actually work. This post followed a couple of other research projects on the issue, which showed limited evidence for simple valuation-based timing strategies. Now there is a new paper on Warren Buffett’s

A while ago I wrote a post, "Does the VIX Know More Than the S&P 500?", and concluded "when the VIX and the S&P 500 are both up on the day sell the stocks, either through the futures of an ETF. " An astute reader, Leo Cheng, pointed out that the VIX index has a certain

Since Rolf Banz published his groundbreaking paper that identified the so-called “small stock effect” in 1981, the investment community has acknowledged the existence of a return premium afforded to smaller-capitalization stocks over their larger counterparts. Banz’s study demonstrated that

The success of the carry trade strategy has led to its widespread proliferation, despite the fact that it contradicts economic theory. In short, this strategy involves borrowing (going short) a currency with a relatively low interest rate and using the proceeds to purchase (going long) a currency

Scott Andrews is the CEO and Co-Founder of InvestiQuant. Scott has been trading full time since 2004, finding great success trading the opening gap and launching MasterTheGap.com in 2008. Scott has published over 1,500 daily gap analysis videos and his exact gap trading plan prior to the market open

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

The best links for the month of July, as voted by our readers: P/E “Attention” Strategies Earn Monthly Excess Return of 1% [Alpha Architect] Back to Fundamentals [Dual Momentum] New Paper from Markowitz: Introducing the Gerber Statistic [Flirting with Models] Video: James Simons – Numberphile

Abstract: The short ratio — shares shorted to shares outstanding — is an oft-used measure of arbitrageurs’ opinion about a stock’s over-valuation. We show that days-to-cover (DTC), which divides a stock’s short ratio by its average daily share turnover, is a more theoretically

SPX Strangle - High Loss Threshold - 80 DTE This post looks at selling one-lot options strangles on the S&P 500 Index (SPX), initiated at 80 days-to-expiration (DTE). The results in this post were derived from more than 2300 individual trades entered by the backtester. Other 80 DTE variations

We are now about a year and a half away from the next presidential election. This means that the campaigning has been underway for over a month. Quite why the electioneering needs to last for a third of a presidential term is beyond me, but that might just be because I am a closet communist

There are many studies showing that models beat experts, including the meta-study “Clinical versus mechanical prediction: A meta-analysis” by Grove et al. (2000). However, given this knowledge that models beat experts, forecasters still prefer to use the human (expert) prediction as opposed to

Recently we read an excellent article on investing from Alpha Architect entitled One way to beat the market? Be different! In the article, the author shows how thinking differently from the pack can provide better performance for your investment portfolio. As often happens with lateral thinking,

"Buy the rumor, sell the fact" is an over-used phrase traders say to describe the way the equity markets get excited by future events then lose steam when the event actually happens. Because the VIX is strongly negatively correlated with the equity markets, this could be changed to

In my posts, I often mention a volatility rebalancing strategy. Originally, this strategy supposed to rebalance a portfolio daily to local volatility measured by standard deviation. I strongly suspect, that a common retail investor will stop trying to understand this strategy right after words

Markowitz Model is a famous method allocated in the Portfolio Investment Theory. This model provides efficient portfolios, i.e. portfolios with the highest rentability and lowest risk possible through mathematical programming. The set of portfolios composes the efficient frontier. The strategy is

One of the things that “everyone knows to be true” is that the trades of company insiders convey valuable information. But is this really true? And are some types of trades more informative than others? If you can get hold of the relevant data, this is the sort of question that is very amenable

In a round about way from New York to Singapore, I landed in Oz in 2012. It was like walking into a pre '08 New York or Ireland with funnier accents. They call '08 the 'GFC' or the 'Global Financial Crisis' and talk about it in a sort of detached way - because that

Seminal work by Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) found that past winners outperform past losers over a horizon of 3-12 months. Investors thus take a long position on winner stocks and a short position on loser stocks in order to realise anomalous profits. This strategy is widely adopted and appears to be

I use sports betting markets as a laboratory to test behavioral theories of cross-sectional asset pricing anomalies. Two unique features of these markets provide a distinguishing test of behavioral theories: 1) the bets are completely idiosyncratic and therefore not confounded by rational theories;

Liquidity can be described as the ability to trade a large number of investments quickly, at low costs and when you want to. Because it is a priced risk, liquidity and its associated price effects are an important aspect of financial markets. In illiquid markets, such as the private equity market,

Risk Premia in Option Markets

Summary Trend-following is one of the oldest investment methods Labeled as technical analysis, trend-following went largely un-researched by academics Research of cross-sectional momentum exploded after Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman published their seminal 1992 study, but time-series

Low volatility stocks are better than those with high betas, right? Wrong! Completely and utterly wrong. High betas are costlier because as not-very-many point out - convexity or gamma is important! When the S&P is doing well the high beta index has a beta of 1.84 and when it's doing badly,

This study was inspired by Ben Carlson’s blog post a few months ago. Ben highlights Robert Hagstrom’s book “The Warren Buffett Portfolio.” The high level question is the following: How can one beat the market? Answer: To beat the market, you have to be different than the market. One simple

I recently had a disagreement with a trader friend. He said CNBC has become a waste of time to have on. I said it has always been a waste of time to have on. His point was that there are times when has been able to give him ideas about what stocks to follow. He thought it was self-evident that

This post looks at selling one-lot options strangles on the S&P 500 Index (SPX), initiated at 73 days-to-expiration (DTE). The results in this post were derived from more than 2300 individual trades entered by the backtester. Other 73 DTE variations will be posted on my Twitter feed,

The following post shows you how to check for any stock splits and ex-dividends happening. It'll spit out a list of symbols. These can be used as alerts or piped into another script for updating your database as needed. I want to thank pcavatore for suggesting this topic! Comments and

This excerpt is from the book Global Asset Allocation now available on Amazon as an eBook. If you promise to write a review, go here and I’ll send you a free copy. —- I would classify both my mother and grandmother as traditional Southern cooks. Their style was very much of the “finger”

The Mojito uses a step function to switch up allocations between the VXX and VXZ ETFs over time. A bunch of rules which says... If the spot VIX to VXV (3 month VIX future) ratio ('IVTS') is lower than 0.91 then short the VXX (short term VIX future ETF) and weight by -0.7, while long the

In a recent post I discussed how the short borrow rate could be used as a predictor of future stock returns. This prompted a reader to ask if the analysis had taken short squeezes into account. This is a good point. Because of the mechanics of short selling it is sometimes not possible to hold short

Well here I go again breaking one of my own cardinal rules again – i.e., being critical of someone else’s writing. Must be getting cranky in my old age. Anyway, I recently read an article calling margin debt “an indicator that predicts nothing.” No the writer is actually technically correct

Active investors with limited attention and capital constraints use fundamental metrics to screen and sort potential investments. Price-earnings (P/E) ratios are extremely popular, and are typically calculated using four trailing quarters of net income. Changes in the rankings of published P/E

People generally compartmentalize their knowledge. They try to think of things in terms of categories and frameworks rather than remember a bunch of disconnected facts. For example, chemists think of the world in terms of interactions between elements, astrologists (a.k.a stupid people) think of the

This post looks at selling one-lot options strangles on the S&P 500 Index (SPX), initiated at 66 days-to-expiration (DTE). The results in this post were derived from more than 2300 individual trades entered by the backtester. For background on the setup for the backtests, as well as the

This week’s Charts Of The Day and blog posts have had a heavy bearish bent to them. That isn’t by design. We just go where the data leads us and much of the data, in our view, is skewing to the bearish side for equities. Included in the concerning assortment of data are many examples of

Carry and Trend Following Returns in Foreign Exchange Market

Today we have a guest post from David Weilmuenster who I worked with while at Connors Research. A widely applied technique for scoring assets in rotational systems is to rank those assets by their price momentum, or return, over a given historical window and to rotate into the assets with higher

Yesterday we wrote a post showing a potential way to time the market using valuation-based signals. In the past we have also examined how to use momentum-based signals (moving average rules and time-series momentum) to time the market. A natural question is what happens when we combine the

In the last article of the Time Series Analysis series we discussed the importance of serial correlation and why it is extremely useful in the context of quantitative trading. In this article we will make full use of serial correlation by discussing our first time series models, including some

The European Central Bank just released a research report that might be of some interest to readers of this blog. It turns out that Social Data can be useful in predicting the stock market (go figure!): Quantifying the effects of online bullishness on international financial markets [ECB] …In our

Mandelbrot has significantly contributed in many ways to the area of finance. He was one of the first who criticized the oversimplifications centered around the early stochastic process models of Bachelier utilizing normal distribution. In his view, markets were fractal and much wilder than

We’ve had a few posts showing that asset allocation systems relying on market valuation indicators (e.g., Shiller CAPE ratios) as a timing signal may end up in disappointment… Can market Valuations Be Effective Market-Timing Signals? Dissecting Goldman’s 99 Percentile Market-Timing Signal