Very brief blog post this month; I'm deep into book writing mode at the moment. Chanelling Clif Assness, I'm just going to present a few charts and lead you to draw your own conclusions. Excess / futures returns from portfolio of 60% S&P 500, 40% US Ten year treasuries (Authors own

Long-short momentum investing highlights attractive performance in Asia and emerging markets However, realized excess returns are significantly lower than theoretical ones Likely explained by transaction costs INTRODUCTION Momentum has been shown to generate attractive excess returns across eight

There’s a reason that international traders, whether they’re in Tokyo, Singapore, or London, follow the US markets. The US is the hub of global finance. It’s on Wall Street where everything is happening. Watching the reaction of European markets to the opening of US markets demonstrates this.

Most investors focus solely on the profitability of their investment strategy. And, even though having a profitable strategy is important, it is not everything. There are still numerous other things to consider. One of them is the size of the investment. The investment size can increase or decrease

As I am sure all of you know Russia has began a full scale war against my home country Ukraine. Please make no mistake - Putin's goal in not to stop the expansion of NATO, not to install puppet government, and certainly not to bring peace. The goal is genocide of Ukrainian people. When Ukraine

Holding stocks overnight is when we buy the close and sell the following day on the open. Is there any edge in this approach in comparison to buying the open and selling the close. Today we will check this phenomenon. We will check the performance of the SPY, then we will try to check it on

I am delighted to share the video from my QuantMinds presentation that I made in Barcelona in December 2021. Many thanks to QuantMinds organizers for allowing me to share this video. First, it was nice to attend the onsite conference in a while and to meet old friends and colleagues. I was

Delta hedging is a trading strategy that aims to reduce the directional risk of short option strategy and reach a so-called delta-neutral position. It does so by buying or selling small increments of the underlying asset. Similarly, grid trading is a trading strategy that buys/sells an asset

I am excited to share the latest paper with Prof. Alexander Lipton. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4035813 We find the semi-analytical solution to one of the unsolved problems in Quantitative Finance, which is to compute survival probabilities and barrier option values for

Diversification has been around since the early 1950s and is often considered a “free lunch” in finance. But is that actually the case? We’ve highlighted here and here that the reality is more complicated than the theory. Consider the two basic assumptions about correlations in the context of

Incorporating market expectations and forecasts into asset allocation used to be more of an art than an analytical process in the 80s. In this post we will review Fisher Black’s elegant and very practical solution to portfolio construction, going through a sector allocation example. The Black

At Quantpedia, we love seasonality effects, and our screener includes several strategies that exploit them. These anomalies are fascinating since they usually offer a favorable risk and reward ratio and are commonly invested only during short periods. Frequently, these strategies are valuable

From 1991 to 2018, capital expenditures as a percentage of total sales remained relatively flat, at about 10 percent. On the other hand, personnel expenses almost doubled during that time. In fact, by 2018 personnel expenses (the costs for hiring, wages, salaries, and bonuses; social security and

I’ve been writing this blog for nine years now. Sometimes I am amazed about topics I have not covered and this is one of them. When developing a new strategy, these are the indicators I likely test: RSI, Historical Volatility and Internal Bar Strength (IBS). I had a reader send me an email

Previous articles in this series examine, from a digital signal processing (DSP) frequency domain perspective, various types of digital filters used by quantitative analysts and market technicians to analyze and transform financial time series for trend-following purposes. An Introduction to Digital

The Fisher Transform converts data to or from a Gaussian distribution. It was first used in algorithmic trading by John Ehlers (1) , and became a common part of indicators since then. In a TASC January 2022 article, Ehlers described a new indicator, the Elegant Oscillator, based on the Inverse

Passive investing enjoys substantial popularity and subsequently attracts the attention of researchers. We blogged about the boom of passive investing and market inelasticity in the past. However, the novel research by Li (2021) examines a different perspective. With the boom of passive investing,

When reading Denev’s book Probabilistic Graphical Models – A New Way of Thinking in Financial Modelling, commented on my blog back in Summer 2020, I put a note in my todo list to model Matalan probability of default using a Bayesian network (for fun, not work). I was rather familiar with this

Financial Cycles – Early Warning Indicators of Banking Crises? Sally Chen (Bank for Int’l Settlements) and Katsiaryna Svirydzenka (IMF) April 2021 Can the upturns and downturns in financial variables serve as early warning indicators of banking crises? Using data from 59 advanced and emerging

Factor investors face numerous choices that do not end even after picking the set of factors. For instance, should they neutralize the factor exposure? If the investor pursues sector neutralization, does the decision depend on a particular factor? Or are the choices different for the long-only

The question of whether or not the FED considers or responds to the stock market in its policy decisions has been studied fairly extensively, however, the subject of the existence of the “FED put” continues to pop up in the literature. In this particular revival of the issue, the authors are

Smart money, crowd intelligence, and AI ETFs have underperformed the S&P 500 since their inception Somewhat surprisingly, all three have almost the same factor exposures Negative exposure to value, and positive exposure to size and momentum factors INTRODUCTION Welcome to the qualifying round of

The Ulcer Performance Index1 (UPI) is a portfolio reward-risk measure introduced by G. Martin2 similar in spirit to the Sharpe Ratio, but using the Ulcer Index (UI) as a risk measure instead of the standard deviation. In this blog post, I will present the mathematics behind the Ulcer Performance

The performance of a portfolio during a single period can be attributed to a set of factors, but in order to aggregate those daily factors and get a breakdown of the portfolio’s total performance during a multi-period (for example 1Y), we have to make use of an smoothing algorithm. This is due to

From 2017 through March 2020, the relative performance of value stocks in the U.S. was so poor, experiencing its largest drawdown in history, that many investors jumped to the conclusion that the value premium was dead. It is certainly possible that what economists call a “regime change” could

This is a short follow up post to one I did a couple of years ago, on "Exogenous risk management". This was quite an interesting post which dug into why expected risk changes for a typical diversified futures trading system. And then I introduced my risk overlay: "Now we have a better

In several articles on this site (see, for instance, A and B), we have commented on the dangers of backtest overfitting in finance. By backtest overfitting, we mean the usage of historical market data to develop an investment model, strategy or fund, where many variations are tried on the same fixed

A lot of ink has been spilled on a seemingly simple question: Why does the momentum factor exist? We have done our fair share contributing to the question and our collective conclusions are in our book Quantitative Momentum. We walked away from the question and determined the following: We will

Mid-2020, I read a book on probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) applied in finance by Alexander Denev. Mid-2021, I hosted a machine learning meetup with an application of PGMs to predict the future states of economic and financial variables, and geopolitical events based on forward-looking views

Most of you have probably heard the saying that somebody “averaged” into or out of his investment position. But what does it exactly mean, and what different dollar-cost averaging strategies exist? We plan to unveil our new “Dollar-Cost Averaging” report for Quantpedia Pro clients next week,

Cryptocurrency hedge funds generated abnormally high and uncorrelated returns since 2014 However, the returns can be simply attributed to the performance of Bitcoin Many crypto-beta ETFs & ETPs have been launched, so crypto hedge funds need to move from beta to alpha INTRODUCTION

The most basic tenet of financial theory is that risk and expected return are related. One widely used measure of risk is volatility. As far back as 1976, with the publication of Fischer Black’s “Studies of Stock Price Volatility Changes,” financial economists have known that volatility and

Do common equity factors suffer during bear markets? Undoubtedly, the market factor is a rather unpleasant investment during bear markets, but what about the long-short factors? Are they able to deliver performance? The research paper by Geertsema and Lu (2021) provides several answers and

Inflation — what’s that? … It has been quite a while since inflation has been considered a problem. Today, however, the angst surrounding the possibility of a resurgence in inflation is real and “top of mind” for investors. If the current fear becomes a reality, how should investors react?

One of the primary benefits of Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) is the ability to manage losses during major market declines. TAA does that by reducing allocation to risk asset classes like stocks and real estate, and increasing allocation to defensive assets like bonds and gold. In this post, we

Building on our last article regarding best practices for quantitative finance research groups, this article asks the question: What is the best setup and culture for a quant team? This question may have different answers depending on who you ask. Fortunately, there are some glimpses and statements

ETFs are a negligible owner of US stocks Primary and secondary ETF trading has not grown quicker than total stock trading The impact of ETFs on stocks is less strong than frequently suggested INTRODUCTION “Software is eating the world.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote these words

Stock and options markets can disagree about a stock’s value because of informed trading in options and/or price pressure in the stock. This difference between the options implied stock price and the actual traded stock price (DOTS) can give insight into the markets view on the expected future

Equities provide significant long-term returns, but the growth certainly is not constant or even stable. Anyway, this holds for almost every financial asset. Bear markets alternate bull markets, and expansion periods rotate with recession periods. Since recessions and bear markets come hand in hand

The basic idea behind factor models is that a large range of assets’ returns can be explained by exposure to a small range of factors. Returns reflect factor risk premia and price responses to unexpected changes in the factors. The theoretical basis is arbitrage pricing theory, which suggests that

It’s early in the morning and the markets are about to open. As an individual trader/investor, or perhaps the manager of a group of traders/investors, you are intensely studying the latest news feed that you think may have an impact on your portfolio. Amongst the other plethora of tools at your

Happy new year! A very quick post from me this month - I'm trying to get ready for teaching next week and also cracking on with my latest book. On the Systematic Trader podcast I recently discussed using a clustering algorithim to group instruments. Using my software, pysystemtrade, I can get a

This is an independent test of Optimum3, a tactical asset allocation strategy from Todd Tresidder of FinancialMentor.com. Optimum3 starts as a momentum strategy similar to many of the TAA strategies we track. It combines that with a unique approach to portfolio optimization to enforce a degree of

Stock returns can be heavily impacted by certain events. Sometimes these events are unexpected or a surprise (natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism) and other times they are scheduled (presidential elections, earnings announcements, financial data releases). We can use pandas to obtain

Indisputably, we are witnesses of an ETF mega boom. From passive to active ETFs, their numbers seem to be ever-increasing. Since these exchange-traded funds can be excellent (accessible, transparent, liquid) instruments, it is a great necessity to examine their possible usage in active and

Floating rate ETFs pursue differentiated strategies Some of them are highly correlated to equities, limiting any diversification benefits The correlation with interest rates and inflation has been low INTRODUCTION Despite the consensus on high inflation being transitory in 2021, the five-year,

In general, a factor is described as a characteristic that can be associated with a group of assets, and it helps to explain their returns and risks. As noted in the literature focusing on CAPM, the market itself can be viewed as the primer and most significant equity factor. Besides the market

I’ve been seeing lots of seasonality type charts on the S&P500 where they take the average return for each day of the year and then create a return curve for the year. The chart often ‘shows’ the sell in May and buy in November flatness of the returns. And then the holiday end of the year

The Time-Varying Relation between Stock Returns and Monetary Variables David G. McMillan (University of Stirling) November 2, 2021 The nature of the relation between stock returns and the three monetary variables of interest rates (bond yields), inflation and money supply growth, while oft studied,

In our 2016 book “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investor” Andrew Berkin and I recommended that due to the risks of data mining (or p-hacking)—researchers torture the data until it confesses—for you to consider investing in a factor it should have demonstrated a premium that was: