More and more frequently I come across people who express an interest in R, and I thought I would share some advice to help people decide if R is something they should use, as well as some high level advice on getting started. Most of these people are developers with at least few years experience

Next week is options expiration week. March is the first time of the year when stock options, index options, index futures, and single-stock/ETF futures all expire at the same time. This event is often referred to as Quadruple Witching or as we prefer to call it in the Stock Trader’s Almanac (page

This study sought to disentangle the effects of size and whether there are size and momentum effects on Jordan firm returns. Initial findings showed that size effect has important role in explaining returns. For momentum effect, while in general there is no momentum effect in Jordan firm market, the

Years flat by the Ides of March $SPY

The images above are the famous Sierpinski Triangle and the Koch Snowflake. These objects are “self-similar” and this means that examination at finer levels of resolution will reveal the same shape. Both are examples of “fractal” geometry, and are characteristic of many phenomena in the

Journal of Econometrics accepts several papers on option pricing, some are quite interesting and represent the recent developments of this field. I list them here just in case you are also interested. Smile from the Past: A general option pricing framework with multiple volatility and leverage

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Skew, our second blog. Until we move it to its permanent home, you can find it at GestaltU.com/skew/. Bookmark it or add it to your feed reader right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Every day, we consume a formidable amount of information. Some of the

Everyone knows about value investing now, and everyone is tilting towards value, so its going to stop working. Everyone is saying this to me lately--sometimes as a question, sometimes as a statement of fact. Yogi Berra famously said, "no one goes to that restaurant anymore, its too

The nation's recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions concerning the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the "real" economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively

You can use the Piotroski F-Score to improve most investment strategies, not just a low price to book strategy as Joseph Piotroski successfully proved in his 2000 research paper "Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers". How to

Do popular capitalization-based exchange-traded funds (ETF) confirm the existence of a reliably exploitable size effect? To investigate, we compare the difference in equally weighted returns (small minus large) for the following matched pair of small-large ETFs: iShares Russell 2000 Index (Smallcap)

Momentum in firm fundamentals, i.e., earnings momentum, explains the performance of strategies based on price momentum. Earnings surprise measures subsume past performance in cross sectional regressions of returns on firm characteristics, and the time-series performance of price momentum strategies

The code in R for Conditional Percentile Channels is now available on Michael Kapler’s Systematic Investor blog. The original code was contributed by long-time reader Pierre Chretien and subsequently verified by Michael. Pierre has been generous enough to share code from the blog material several

A short one this time around. Anyway, many traders are familiar with the effects of seasonality in the stock market. If you would like to know more may I recommend this link? But far fewer traders are aware that bonds have displayed several meaningful and useful seasonal trends. For example…. 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

This post will be a quick review of Iron Condor option strategy starting structures. I will begin with the three starting structures that I have used for backtesting on this blog. We will then move on to a few other structures, with some discussion on how these structures can be modified and/or

Related research paper has been included into existing free strategy reviews. #5 - FX Carry Trade #8 - FX Momentum #9 - FX Value – PPP Strategy Authors: Pojarliev, Levich Title: A New Look at Currency Investing Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571391 Abstract: The authors

March turning points (objective) $SPY

I pushed quantmod 0.4-4 to CRAN this weekend. It adds a getSymbols.yahooj function to pull stock data from Yahoo Finance Japan, and fixes issues in getOptionChain.yahoo and getSymbols.oanda. Changes to the Yahoo Finance and Oanda websites broke the getOptionChain.yahoo and getSymbols.oanda

I have just been trying to import some data into R. The data were exported from a SQL Server client in tab-separated value (TSV) format. However, reading the data into R the "usual" way produced unexpected results: > data <- read.delim("sample-query.tsv", header = FALSE,

In a prior blog post, I wrote about a simple formula that can be utilized to understand the impact that rising rates may have upon a constant maturity fixed-income index. Emanuel Derman wrote a similar post about constant duration indices. While most people are aware of duration and how to use it to

We examine the causal effect of limits-to-arbitrage on ten well-known asset pricing anomalies using Regulation SHO as a natural experiment. We find that asset pricing anomalies become weaker on portfolios constructed with pilot stocks during the pilot period. The effect is both statistically and

Creating a trading strategy is only the first step to trading successfully. You must then evaluate its performance and decide if you can trust it on a live account. While so much attention gets paid to coming up with a strategy, there is surprisingly little on how to tell if the strategy is any

Yesterday we shared a link to a video showing how Python’s Networkx package could be combined with Gephi to produce some stunning network visualizations. Today we wanted to use these same tools to look at the correlation structure of the S&P 500. To do so, we took the correlation matrix of the

The price of gold is a unique and interesting financial series but not an easy one to predict. It is very volatile with large sharp unexpected movements. In this post we analyse its relationship with certain currencies and if they can provide an indication of the direction of the gold movements.

This post will introduce my up and coming IKReporting package, and functions that compute and plot rolling returns, which are useful to compare recent performance, since simply looking at two complete equity curves may induce sample bias (EG SPY in 2008), which may not reflect the state of the

I have added three new summary pages to this blog that can be accessed from the horizontal navigation/menu bar above. The topics covered are: Starting Structure Iron Condor Articles This page lists most of the iron condor (IC) starting structure backtesting posts from this blog. This page can be

The study below appeared in the Quantifinder on Friday. It is one I last showed on January 27, 2014 and it examines large drops on Fridays. Both the Crash of ’29 and the Crash of ’87 happened on Monday. The Crash of ’87 is still remembered by many traders that are active today. In 1987 there

#83 - Pre-Holiday Effect Authors: Carchano, Tornero Title: The Pan-European Holiday Effect Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2556949 Abstract: The construction of a single European block in the context of financial markets has caused the different national stock exchanges of

This past Friday (3/6/2015) was a difficult day for most portfolios that are long any major asset excluding the dollar index and volatility. Stocks, bonds and gold declined. SPY was down 1.4%, TLT fell 2.2%, GLD also down 2.7%. We got some reactions from some of our subscribers asking if the models

To install Systematic Investor Toolbox (SIT) please visit About page. MKTSTK an another amazing graphics example to visualize correlation matrix at Stock market visualization: Minimum Spanning Trees Following their example, I will visualize below the stocks in NASDAQ 100 Index for the last year

See this, but then VIX and everything else has not peaked yet… Connor RSI4 triggered EOD

Understanding Options-Based Sentiment in the Stock Market (Traderfeed) What Do Accruals Tell Us About Future Cash Flows? (Barth, Clinch and Israeli) Look for People, Not for Alpha: Mutual Funds Success and Managerial Intellectual Capital (Naidenova, Parshakov and etal) Financial Education, Literacy

Barry has a nice piece in the Washington Post asking a simple question: What is the best valuation metric to assess if a stock is cheap or expensive? Jack and I were honored to see that Barry highlighted our 2013 Journal of Portfolio Management paper: Analyzing Valuation Measures: A Performance

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. It is also available as a printable PDF on Gumroad. —— “No strategy is so good that it can’t have a bad year or more. You’ve

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. It is also available as a printable PDF on Gumroad. —- “I think the single most important thing that you can do is diversify your

In a recent article I wrote about an indicator that I read about somewhere that I had written down only as “MVCI”. Well, thanks to alert reader Gary, I have come to learn that I read about in the March 2013 issue of one of my favorite magazines, “Technical Analysis of Stocks and

We wanted to celebrate our 100th post on MKTSTK by exploring a new type of financial visualization. New to us, at least. One of the best aspects to making of living off the markets is that you never stop learning. A few weeks ago we ran across an example in Python’s sklearn for visualizing stock

Congratulations to Apple (AAPL) for being added to the Dow Jones Industrial Index. Frankly, it is about time. AAPL is the largest company by market cap in the world and one of the most influential. What apparently made this possible is a 4 for 1 stock split by Visa (V). Since DJIA is a

Before and after performance of stocks recently added to the Dow Industrials $DIA $AAPL

The recent series analyzed Factor Dual Momentum. US Value and Momentum factor portfolios were tested back to 1950, courtesy of Ken French’s data library. Portfolios are ranked on 12 month return. Using VBR and PDP for value and momentum, the current … Continue reading

In the February 2015 edition of The Journal of Finance, a well known academic paper, “The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift”, was finally published, almost 4 years after the working paper was released in the public domain in 2011. Authored by researchers, Lucca and Moench, at the US Federal Reserve,

How worried should you be when you hear someone say that the market is overvalued? Wesley Gray at Alpha Architect takes a deep dive into the topic of timing the market using CAPE, Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted PE ratio in a recent post. His results should give pause to even he most strident market

Ever heard that joke about how if you are young and you aren't a democrat, you have no heart, but if you are old and you aren't a republican, you have no brain? Well, there seems to be something similar happening with the portfolios of young and old investors. Stocks with the youngest

I have shown the study below a several times in the past, but not since January, and the employment night hot streak remains strong. The overnight futures market has been loving the Employment Report since the summer of 2012. The Employment Report is released at 8:30 AM Eastern (normally the 1st

Contrary to basic finance principles, high-beta and high-volatility stocks have long underperformed low-beta and low-volatility stocks. This anomaly may be partly explained by the fact that the typical institutional investor’s mandate to beat a fixed benchmark discourages arbitrage activity in

A kind reader directed me in a comment on Experiments in Time Series Clustering to this paper. Clustering of Time Series Subsequences is Meaningless: Implications for Previous and Future Research Eamonn Keogh and Jessica Lin Computer Science & Engineering Department University of California –

Utilities Divergence Spells Trouble for Stocks $SPY $XLU

SPX rallies 200% in 6 Years $SPY

After a strong string of positive performances, the State of TF index pulled back last month to post a negative return, still leaving 2015 in positive territory. Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: February return: -2.05% YTD return: 4.24% Below is