Q2 strong in Pre-Election Years $SPY

The cost of fuel in South Africa (and I imagine pretty much everywhere else) is a contentious topic. It varies from month to month and, although it is clearly related to the price of crude oil and the exchange rate, various other forces play an influential role. According to the Department of Energy

Does Warren Buffett consistently keep Berkshire Hathaway in market-beating form? If so, how does he do it? In his annual letters to stockholders, he includes company performance and benchmark data and describes in general terms how he goes about investing. He sometimes shares his thoughts on the

Forecasting. No quant likes to do it. It's what stock analysts do, clever people are above that sort of thing. In spite of (or perhaps due to a lower IQ) here's my forecast of the S&P 500 for the next quarter. The graph shows that there's about a 10% chance of the S&P 500

#5 - FX Carry Trade #8 - FX Momentum Authors: Olszweski, Zhou Title: Strategy diversification: Combining momentum and carry strategies within a foreign exchange portfolio Link: http://apps.olin.wustl.edu/faculty/zhou/O_Z_JHDF_2014.pdf Abstract: Hedge funds, such as managed futures, typically use two

There is sometimes confusion associated with so-called "momentum" strategies--we want to clear the muddy waters. We break momentum into two categories to differentiate between the different approaches to momentum: (1) Absolute, or time-series momentum: an asset classes' own past

Eugene Fama and Kenneth French released their seminal white paper 'The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns' in June 1992 which added value (as well as size) as explanatory factors that drove market (out)performance. Per Investopedia: Fama and French attempted to better measure market

Dong Lou splashed on the academic scene in 2009 and boy has he been busy! Prof Lou has some great papers out there that have inspired a lot of research and investing ideas at Alpha Architect. A few of our favorites: 'Consistent' Earnings Surprises We hypothesize that analysts with a

A perennial favorite with investors, presumably because they are easy to understand and implement, are trades based on a regularly occurring pattern, preferably one that is seasonal in nature. A well-known example is the Christmas effect, wherein equities generally make their highest risk-adjusted

To All my Readers and Followers of QuantAtRisk.com I have a very special offer today: subscribe now to the book’s mailing list and pay 15% more per book before its Official Premiere in April. Just click and explore. This is a 1-day Special Offer!

Wednesday will be the 1st day of a new month. A couple of months ago I shared a chart that showed that the first day of the month has weakened substantially in recent years. Today I will use a couple of other charts to show just how drastic the change in market character has been. These charts

98% of the last 65 year's daily stock returns are explained by one simple formula: tinv ( dof ) * Stdev.s * [ ( dof - 2 ) / dof ] ^ 0.5 The t distribution is a wonderful thing. Plus the original paper from 'Student' himself is an easy read! Why is the t-distribution so good? My hunch

I have recently been looking at using a Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine, and in particular Graham Taylor's thesis paper, Composable Distributed-State Models for High-Dimensional Time Series and the associated code available from here. My adaptation of this is very much a work in

Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) is one of the most popular technical indicators used by traders. It is a flexible indicator that can be used for determining the strength and direction of a trend. It has three distinct features and in this first post we are going to do a high-level

Does the seasonal change marked by the Easter holiday, with the U.S. stock market closed on the preceding Good Friday, tend to produce anomalous returns? To investigate, we analyze the historical behavior of the S&P 500 Index before and after the holiday. Using daily closing levels of the

In this post we will look at the backtest results for dynamic exits of 52 days-to-expiration (DTE) Iron Condors (IC), with 8 delta short strikes, with different profit and loss exits. This is a non-directional options trading strategy that seeks to profit from a market that stays within in a range

Ireland is at the center of most maps of the world. In China however, you'll find the 'middle land' exactly where every Chinese person would expect. If only Australia could shake off its colonial status once and for all and produce an 'upside down' map. The mercator

Investors are often looking for uncorrelated returns so as to better diversify. If one looks at world indices & equities, there is much less diversity between assets than there was a decade ago, indeed the cross-market correlations are remarkably high. On the other hand, from a trading

In the last three posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we looked at how dividend adjusted data and non-dividend adjusted data generate different results with Momentum Rotation Strategies. We also looked at a hybrid approach using the signals generated from the non-dividend adjusted series, combined with

For many years now the “gold standard” in factor models has been the 1996 Fama-French 3-factor model: Fig 1 Fig 5Here r is the portfolio’s expected rate of return, Rf is the risk-free return rate, and Km is the return of the market portfolio. The “three factor” β is analogous to the

Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), also known as sustainable or responsible investing, is the application of ethical as well as financial considerations in making investment decisions. SRI therefore recognizes and incorporates societal needs and benefits. SRI may first date back to the Quakers

We have made the following changes to CXOadvisory.com: We added a new Value Strategy to the main menu to track the performance of the strategy described in “Simple Asset Class ETF Value Strategy” on a quarterly basis. We intend this new strategy to complement Momentum Strategy. We retired the

Quick... which of the three allocations A, B, or C is 60% S&P 500 Index / 40% Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index, 55% S&P 500 Index / 45% Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index, or 62% S&P 500 Index / 38% Barclays Treasury Bond Index going back all the way to the inception of the Barclays

Book Overview One of the most fundamental choices for any investor is their approach to strategic asset allocation. What are the major asset classes to consider, and how much should be allocated to each asset class? For example, at a simplistic level, how much should one invest in stocks versus

Not a great month. Neither for the Wizards or for this blog, with such a long delay publishing this month’s report. Apologies for reporting the February figures so close to… April. For various reasons I was unable to get to this earlier than now. Here it is finally. A negative return, but only

Today we’re going to setup a MySQL database, populate it with some data, and run a simple query. More complicated stuff to come, but this is a great start for those who have never used a relationship database management system (RDBMS) before. (Note: Sign up for the new Gödel’s Market Newsletter

The 90's. Microsoft and Netscape are throwing features at their browsers seeing what will stick. Javascript was originally envisioned as a simple language for amateurs while the pros would develop client side Java applets. Javascript was created in 10 days! Bastardised Broken at birth (10

We are probably most well known for our quantitative value investing strategies. The heart of our strategy is detailed in Wes' book, Quantitative Value (a reader's digest version is here). In the development of the Quantitative Value system there is no mention of the concept of

Comment from reader Rich on yesterday's post prompted me to run a quick investigation - does adjusting bars helps to bring distribution of highs and lows closer to theory? The answer is definitely yes, but as everything else in life the reality is complicated. Here's what I found: Using

There are some anomalies that shake the assumption of efficient market. One of the most studied is related to the size of the companies. Some authors have demonstrated that smaller companies (that is, the ones with smaller market capitalization) tend to outperform larger firms. What could be the

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample includes

So the stock market sold off hard yesterday. If you were living under a big enough rock you might have missed it, but now the doom and gloomers, the technicians pointing at broken “levels” and trendlines, and the permabears will probably be saturating the media for a few days. This is ok, and

In the previous article we discussed Monte Carlo methods and their implementation in CUDA, focusing on option pricing. Today, we take a step back from finance to introduce a couple of essential topics, which will help us to write more advanced (and efficient!) programs in the future. In subsequent

#12 - Pairs Trading with Stocks #55 - Pairs Trading with Country ETFs Authors: Leung, Li Title: Optimal Mean Reversion Trading with Transaction Costs and Stop-Loss Exit Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2222196 Abstract: Motivated by the industry practice of pairs trading, we

I've seen studies in the past that suggest that there's an optimal day of the week to trade. One well know trader in particular, Larry Williams (famous for trading $10K to $1.1 mill in a single year with real funds in a global trading competition) , discusses

I'm often asked by individuals in high-school or sixth-form (for those of us in the UK!), as well as those contemplating heading back to university, as to what the most appropriate degree course is to take in order to become a quant. If I had to pick one course to cover all aspects of quant

My other half and I are considering moving to Beijing. The big smoke. A polluted day is the equivalent to between one sixth and 21 cigarettes per day. I don't smoke, but I'd rather a regulated cigarette than a week of breathing polluted air. Nevertheless the analogy is helpful.

One of the most problematic areas of quantitative trading is optimising a forecasting strategy to improve its performance. Seasoned quant traders realise that it is all too easy to generate a strategy with stellar predictive ability on a backtest. However, some backtests can mask the danger of an

Univariate Volatility Forecast Evaluation Regression based test - Mincer Zarnowitz regression Pairwise Comparison - Diebold Mariano test Jarque-Bera test References and credits Why this post? Open-source software is constantly evolving and improving. Code related to some of my previous posts is not

Previous work shows that average returns on common stocks are related to firm characteristics like size, earnings/price, cash flow/price, book-to-market equity, past sales growth, long-term past return, and short-term past return. Because these patterns in average returns apparently are not

I will be speaking at the 2015 Australian Technical Analysts Association on May 15 to 17, 2015. My topics are “The development of an S&P500 stock weekly rotation strategy” and “From Internet Article to Trading Strategy: An ETF Monthly Rotation Strategy.” For more information about the

Just few days ago stock.nu published a post with charts showing that empirical distribution of daily lows follows a U-shaped pattern, i.e. daily low is not equally likely to happen at any time during the trading day, rather low is more likely to occur near the open or the close. Similar (symmetric)

There’s been some nice posts on randomness the last week or so, in particular here and here. I would like to look at how we can use simulations to get a better understanding of how some aspect of a trading system holds up relative to a bunch of random trades. In this example, I look at entries on

Beware of focusing an investment decision on "yield." In this piece we want to highlight that investing in high dividend yield stocks--without considering the valuation--is probably a BAD idea. We've noticed that many market participants point to the historical performance of high

The Sharpe of a Meb-Faber-esque Timing model over the whole of the last 10+ years has been 1.12. Of course that doesn't tell the whole story. You can see the wild swings. So there it is. A timing model whose S

Extended pattern in US Dollar warns of regime shift $UUP

3 year high for $NYUD: significant money flow, especially into large caps: https://rrspstrategy.wordpress.com/charts/ Statistics for last 3 years 1 month return after $NYUD > 500 1.8% 1 month return (all) 1.2%

My last post dealt with the characteristics and the potential usefulness of the aggregate social media sentiment in the U.S. stock market. As we know, social media is only one of the many possible proxies of the investor mood. I will look below at some of the alternative indicators from a

When it comes to managing a portfolio of stocks versus a benchmark the problem is very different from defining an absolute return strategy. In the former one has to hold more stocks than in the later where no stocks at all can be held if there is not good enough opportunity. The reason for that is

Backtesting is a very important step in strategy development. But if you have ever went through the full strategy development cycle, you may have realized how difficult it is to backtest a strategy properly. People use different tools to implement a backtest depending on their expertise and goals.