In this post we will show how the properties of a triangle can be used to intuitively obtain insights about the volatilities and correlations of currency pairs. Once the dominant branch of mathematics, geometry plays now a secondary role. However, its graphical arguments still seem to be better

Systematically trading a single instrument can be a bit dull. There are times when your chosen stock isn’t trending or doing much. So your system just sits there and waits…and waits..and waits. Obviously we don’t want to trade just to trade – that’s a good way to start losing money. But if

Traditional finance academics lean towards risk-based models to explain why various return characteristics, such as value and momentum, predict returns. But there is another school of thought often referred to as ‘behavioral finance.’ This field has some of its own ideas (see below) on why

While the holiday season has long been regarded as a time of excess, folks this year are bracing for another challenge besides annual waistline expansion: price inflation. As we gather with family and friends for the holidays in coming weeks many are predicting that this year’s turkey will be the

With a long-term time horizon, investors should consider alternatives to the market-cap weighted equity indices A valuation-based approach for creating an equities portfolio may seem more sensible Using EBITDA / EV yield seems to avoid some of the quality issues of other value metrics INTRODUCTION

Hendrik Bessembinder published a fascinating paper, which finds that nearly all publicly traded stocks in the U.S. — if held as buy and hold investments — underperform Treasury bills. This finding is incredibly surprising and interesting. Of course, when bold claims are made, they tend to

Today’s study is one of several that will be appearing in the Quantifiable Edges Subscriber Letter in a few hours. Quantifiable Edges Black Friday sale has been extended through Cyber-Monday. Act now to take advantage. After Monday – its gone. Black Friday was a tough one for the market, with

We present a theoretical and empirical methodology that reflects the Cryptocurrency version of VIX, which we name it as CVIX (Crypto VIX), and captures the future 30 days forward Crypto risk (fear). Our framework is built on idiosyncratic and systematic Crypto risk, and is not based on the option

Volatility indices, based upon the methodology of the Cboe volatility index (VIX), serve as measures of near-term market uncertainty across asset classes. They are constructed from out-of-the-money put and call premia using variance swap pricing. Volatility indices for fixed income markets are of

Table of contents: What does live algorithmic trading on the Cloud mean? What are the pros and cons of deploying your trading strategies to the Cloud? What is the Cloud Service? What is Cloud used for? What cloud providers are good? What are Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Why should I use AWS? Why

In recent years we’ve seen an increase in the accuracy of NLP models through the use of Transformers. These models rely on the attention mechanism to identify key features but, how do they work? And most importantly, can we somehow use them in finance? Transformers The transformer is a relatively

About a year and a half ago, after one of the worst relative drawdowns the value factor has ever seen, I wrote a piece showing the value factor was cheap relative to history. Since then, value strategies are on a solid run (look at pretty much any type of value strategy and I think you’d agree).

The range over the last week has been very tight. Every SPY close in the 5 days since 11/16 has been within the intraday range of that 11/16/21 bar. It is said that consolidations are often resolved in the direction of the trend. This guideline suggests that we’re more likely to see another leg up

With more than 118 million Americans in or nearing retirement (age 50 or older)[1], income has become a key component for many portfolios. But as asset allocators reach for yield in a low-rate environment, they must be extra mindful of the additional risks they may be accepting. In this blog we

The valuation of the S&P 500 depends on portfolio construction Analyst EPS projections are likely overly optimistic PEG ratios of other stock markets are more attractive INTRODUCTION Striking a bargain seems to bring joy to all people, regardless of their location and their beliefs. It is almost

Although the factors in asset pricing models offer a premium in the long run, they are undergoing bull and bear market cycles in the short term. One would expect that it is due to their connection to the business cycles as the factor premium represents a reward for bearing the macroeconomic risks. A

My last blog post was about a new method for a daily dynamic optimisation of portfolios with limited capital, to allow them to trade large numbers of instruments. (Although I normally write my blog posts to be self contained, you'll definitely have to read the previous one for this to make any

This blog post is the continuation (and finale) of series about Quantconnect’s AlphaMarket strategies. This part is related to the multi-factor strategies notoriously known from the majority of asset classes. We continue in the examination of factor strategies built on top of social trading

The time around Thanksgiving has shown some strong tendencies – both bullish and bearish. I have discussed them a number of times over the years. In the updated table below I show SPX performance results based on the day of the week around Thanksgiving. The bottom row is the Monday of Thanksgiving

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, empirical studies have found the actual relationship to be basically flat, or even negative. Over the last 50

Most Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies trade just once a month. Backtests of those strategies usually assume trades are executed on the last trading day of the month. Why? Monthly asset data is often available further back into history than daily data. Assuming trades are executed at

Let’s talk about insider trading. In an imaginary world where you know with certainty that the price of a stock will change on a given date – you can place a huge investment for enormous gains. Why wouldn’t you? There is no risk of the trade going bad because you have complete certainty in

Today we will again talk more about the portfolio management theory, and we will focus on techniques for combining quantitative strategies into one multi-strategy portfolio. So, let’s imagine we already have a set of profitable investment strategies, and we need to combine them. The goal of such

Given the importance of inflation as a topic, there are surprisingly few inflation-themed ETFs The few available pursue differentiated strategies that result in heterogeneous portfolios The correlation of these ETFs to inflation has been relatively low INTRODUCTION Creating an investment framework

Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis were the most widely used methods for topic modeling for the past 20 years. However, they rely on heavy pre-processing of the text content (custom stop-word lists, stemming, and lemmatization), and require the number of topics to

Value opportunities arise when market prices deviate from contracts’ present values of all associated entitlements or obligations. However, this theoretical concept is difficult and expensive to apply. Instead, simple valuation ratios, such as real interest rates or equity earnings yields with

Now before we dive into testing a strategy we must first define what makes a good pair to test in the first place. This is a question that has not one answer but several depending on the approach you want to take. We will discuss some of the possibilities and the weapons of choice if you want to

Ben and Cameron, which host the excellent Rational Reminder podcast, sit down with Jack Vogel and go through a laundry list of factor investing questions. The topics discussed: 0:27 Do long-only factor premiums survive transaction costs? 2:28 Would the market impact of rebalancing a fund like MTUM

Nobody would argue that nowadays, we live in an information-rich society – the amount of available information (data) is constantly rising, and news is becoming more accessible and frequent. It is indisputable that this evolvement has also affected financial markets. Machine learning algorithms

In the prior post Tracking Posts on WallStreetBets - Part I, we demonstrated how relatively easy it is to extract reddit activities related to a given stock ticker - in their raw form. If you haven't already read that post, you may want to take a moment to skim that article. In this post, we

In this article, we cluster stock price time series with hierarchical clustering and Euclidean, correlation, and Jensen-Shannon distances to answer two questions regarding portfolio diversification. How diversified is a given portfolio? How can a diversified portfolio be constructed? Procedure For

Liquidity—the ability to buy and sell significant quantities of a given asset quickly, at low cost, and without a major price concession—is valuable to investors. Therefore, they demand a premium as compensation for the greater risks and costs of investing in less-liquid securities. For example,

Date and time: Thursday 11/11/2021 at 4:15pm EST & Saturday 11/13/2021 at 11:00am EST Duration: 30-40 minutes + Q&A At Capital Advisors 360, I manage some composite portfolios that include several different models I have developed over the years. Using a couple of the models I trade as

I just got back from a long vacation in Iceland (highly recommend visiting). As usual, when people discover what I do, they ask me about the markets. Several people were worried that the markets are too high. Then I read that the 20-year return of the SPX from 2001 to 2020 was way below the average

Eric Balchunas had a recent tweet that I found fascinating. Eric’s tweet merely captures the tip of the iceberg with respect to the current market environment, which certainly feels “bubbly.” 1 The gist of the tweet is that $META, which is an ETF from our friends over at Roundhill Investments,

In this brief tutorial we will take a look at the different aspects of end-of-day equities data. We will develop an understanding of what the Open, High, Low and Close (OHLC) prices mean, as well as discuss the traded Volume. We will look at how a typical Adjusted Close price is calculated and the

Direct indexing is one of the growth areas in the asset management industry However, direct indexing represents active management, specifically an inferior approach to it Given the poor track record of active management, most investors should avoid pursuing this INTRODUCTION Direct indexing is hot.

Risk control is absolutely crucial for traders. The first rule of trading is to stay in the game. The humble stop loss is the bread and butter for traders trying to control their risk. But what if I told you the stop loss wasn’t needed? What if you could control your risk while also increasing

Did you know that the percentage of foreign sales of the FTSE 100 is 76% and 43% for the SP500? This study investigates the power of indirect international exposure, that is international exposure through holdings of domestic stocks. The authors ask the following: What is the indirect international

In the previous article Estimating Probability of Bitcoin Pullback in its Bullish Market we touched an interesting point worth exploring a bit further. Namely, the probability of Bitcoin close-price closing each day higher than a day ago days in a row. We had seen that in July 2021 Bitcoin moved and

We use the K-means algorithm to answer two questions regarding portfolio diversification. How diversified is a given portfolio? How can a diversified portfolio be constructed? Additionally, we use the multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm to visualize results. Procedure Take the last 120 days of

Though classical option pricing models assume that options are redundant assets, more recent research rejects this idea. However, research on cross-sectional predictors of option returns is relatively scarce and not very well understood. Contrarily, extensive literature examines cross-sectional

Today, arguably more than ever before, the world is governed by the science of probability and statistics. “Big data” is now the norm in scientific research, with terabytes of data streaming into research centers from satellites and experimental facilities, analyzed by supercomputers. “Data

We’re taking a short break from neural networks to return to portfolio optimization. Our last posts in the portfolio series discussed risk-constrained optimization. Before that we examined satisificing vs. mean-variance optimization (MVO). In our last post on that topic, we simulated 1,000

The news story in 2021 that captured the complete attention of the financial press was the Gamestop / WallStreetBets / RoaringKitty episode of late January. A group of presumably small, retail traders banded together on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets forum to drive the price of $GME, $AMC and other

I’m South Korean by birth, but I spent most of my highschool years in Ireland. I wanted to remain in an English speaking country after I graduated, so I chose to go to the University of Waterloo, located in Canada. During the first lecture I attended, I needed to edit something I wrote. I rummaged

When? Wednesday, October 27, 2021 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (Hong Kong Time) Where? At your home, on zoom. All meetups will be online as long as this COVID-19 crisis is not over. The page of the event on Meetup: HKML S4E2 Programme: Talk 1: Systematic Pricing and Trading of Municipal Bonds Petter N.

If you’re new to trading, it may be challenging to know how to get started. There are so many new terms, maths, and concepts, it can seem overwhelming! Now you have to take all that stuff and figure out how to make a profitable system out of it? Most people give up at this point. To address this,

Developed markets have evolved from momentum to mean-reversion markets Other markets like EM or cryptos are momentum-dominated Likely explained by the distribution of retail vs institutional investors INTRODUCTION Markets evolve constantly, but they rarely change structurally. When they do, it is

Understanding the risks of any quantitative trading strategy is one of the pillars of successful portfolio management. Of course, we can hope for good future performance, but to survive market whipsaws, we must have tools for sound risk management. The “Value at Risk” measure is such a standard