Its been a long time folks, but we have some shiny new toys in the works. Current trends in the industry and working with data scientists has made me a believer in the benefits of using a machine learning approach. I have always been a proponent of “theory-free” approaches on this blog as long

After closing at a 20-day low on Thursday, the market put in a bounce attempt on Friday. Monday’s decline to a new low meant that initial bounce attempt failed. But in last night’s subscriber letter we saw several studies that showed the “failed bounce” was more likely to see another bounce

In this article we delve into the challenge of making an asset price series stationary (for reasons discussed below) and preserving as much memory/signal from the original series. We take inspiration from Chapter 5 of the Advances in Financial Machine Learning (AFML) by Dr. Marcos Lopez de Prado

We enjoy hearing from members about their experiences using our platform to analyze and combine tactical asset allocation strategies. We do a bad job of sharing that feedback with other members, and that’s a shame, because there’s often a lot of wisdom in it. So let’s change that. What follows

Value investing has not only underperformed with regard to security selection, but also country selection over the last decade. In an effort to avoid country value traps, we set out to design two signals that might better confirm when a country is likely to exhibit positive re-valuation. We find

A Taxonomy of Anomalies and their Trading Costs 2015, Robert Novy-Marx and Mihail Velikov (with data) …and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns, 2013, Campbell Harvey, Yan Liu, Caroline Zhu (factor list) A Comparison of New Factor Models, 2014, Kewei Hou, Chen Xue, Lu Zhang The Supraview of

What are the research questions? This study uses a long and comprehensive time series covering 1977-2014, with just under 180,000 quarterly observations for trades of short sellers and demand for shares by corporate insiders. (see here for a related paper we covered recently that talks about

In this post we'll look at how the SPX iron condor has been performing since I last analyzed its results back in 2016 (here). For this article, we'll just look at the following variations and how they performed from January 2007 through December 2018: 66 DTE - 25 pt wings, 12 Delta

Core hedge fund strategies are available as low-cost and transparent ETFs The performance of hedge fund ETFs has been comparable to that of their benchmarks ETFs have only captured 1% of hedge fund assets INTRODUCTION As Amazon has been decimating large parts of the retail industry over the last two

There is some interesting new content on the CSSA blog that will be very useful for readers. Investor IQ is currently a free tool that shows basic trend signals (Buy, Hold or Sell) for a wide range of US and Canadian ETFs as well as a relative strength ranking. The signals will be updated as of the

Classical technical indicators like RSI and Stochastic are commonly used to build algorithmic trading strategies. But do these indicators really give you an edge in your market? Are they able to define the times when you want to be invested? This article will show you a way to quantify and compare

Allocators to systematic strategies usually trust live records far more than backtests. Given the moral hazard issues of backtesting in the financial industry, this is understandable (view post here). Unfortunately, for many systematic strategies live records can be even more misleading. First, the

Let’s imagine a world where value stocks actually provide some outperformance at some point… In a world like that, are there any simple rules one could implement into their value system to help avoid “falling knives”? The optimist in me says yes, but the realist says nope. Turns out, it is

Tail Risk Management for Multi-Asset Multi-Factor Strategies David Chambers (University of Cambridge), et al. January 8, 2019 Multi-asset multi-factor portfolio allocation is typically centred around a risk-based allocation paradigm, often striving for maintaining equal volatility risk budgets.

It is notable that the Quantifiable Edges Capitulative Breadth Indicator (CBI) closed at 10 on Thursday. Below is a study that shows other times the CBI reached 10 while the SPX was above its 200ma. 2019-05-10 A very high percentage of instances closed higher when looking out 4 or more days. The

Positive month for the State of Trend Following index. YTD fighting back to the zero line… Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: April return: 2.89% YTD return: -1.6% Below is the chart displaying individual system results throughout April:

Hedging sounds like a smart thing to do. But has it actually worked? This post examines the historical costs and benefits of hedging stock exposure with SPY puts. Interest in hedging strategies tends to increase as market volatility rises. There are many ways to hedge, and a common method is to

Early last week, Meb Faber included me on a conversation on buying stocks trading at 10x their company’s revenue (sales). Is this a good idea and how did it do in the past? Given that most “known” factors have underperformed over the past 10 years, I was interested in seeing if a somewhat

We discuss two major challenges when implementing a dynamic portfolio strategy in practice: Minimising trading costs and enforcing a no-fractional-dealing condition. To master these challenges, we present a flexible and efficient trade cost optimisation algorithm that can be combined with a wide

In this post we compare the performance of the 49 tactical asset allocation strategies that we track to 7 ETFs that provide all-in-one exposure to TAA. We were inspired by James Picerno’s Capital Spectator to run this analysis, so we’ve appropriated his list of 6 ETFs, and added Meb Faber’s

Jeremy had spent most nights over the previous 30+ years on this earth in search of the next big ETF. After all, you don’t “aspire to be at the forefront of innovative ways for marrying the benefits of the exchange-traded fund structure with goals that are associated with active managers” by

We did it. We democratized quant for one more year. Last year, we suffered through a 50% drawdown in attendance due to a perfectly timed snow storm. This year the weather cooperated with us and we were able to get everyone there. Full access to presentation videos and the accompanying slides (when

Option-based strategies generated better risk-adjusted returns than the S&P 500 over the last 30 years Investors should be wary of buying options and focus on harvesting the volatility risk premium by writing options Option-based strategies are an interesting alternative to long-short equity

The authors decompose strategy returns into factor alpha, tax alpha, and residual return for 6 tax-managed versus and 6 tax-indifferent factor strategies and for one indexing strategy. In contrast to other studies, where the impact of starting date dependence is eliminated, this research generates a

In this post we'll look at how the SPX straddle has been performing since I last analyzed its results back in 2015 (here). For this article, we'll just look at the following variations and how they performed from January 2007 through December 2018: 59 DTE - (25:10) / 2 DTE - exit if the

All tests of historical strategy performance (“backtests”) are imperfect reflections of the future. No one can say with certainty how stocks, bonds and other asset classes will perform in the coming years, but we have to root our analysis in something, and past performance is usually the best

In this commentary, we revisit the idea of portable beta: utilizing leverage to overlay traditional risk premia on existing strategic allocations. While a 1.5x levered 60/40 portfolio has historically out-performed an all equity blend with similar risk levels, it can suffer through prolonged periods

Trump’s tweets on Sunday have put the market in a state of disarray. After closing Friday at an all-time high, QQQ is set to gap down nearly 2% this morning. Below is a look at other times QQQ gapped down at least 1% to open the day after closing at a 200-day high the day before. 2019-05-6-12

In this week’s episode, we cover four articles published on our site. The first article, written by Ryan, examines the growth in assets of ETFs and Mutual Funds. The second article, summarized by Elisabetta, examines the performance of funds by differentiating the fund’s manager on his/her

The employment report was the catalyst for the big rally Friday, and the NASDAQ closed at a new high. The study below looks back at other instances where the NASDAQ spiked higher and closed at a new high on the day of an employment report. 2019-05-05 Employment-sparked momentum leading to new highs

Portfolio risk forecasting is subject to great parameter uncertainty, particularly for longer forward horizons. This simply reflects that large drawdowns are observed only rarely, making it hard to estimate their ‘structural’ properties. Bayesian forecasting addresses parameter uncertainty

This is an update to the original blog series that explored a simple strategy of being long UPRO and TMF in equal weight, inverse volatility and inverse-inverse volatility. This strategy crushed the cumulative and risk-adjusted returns of the benchmark SPY etf. However through our research we

I’ve shown numerous studies in the past that suggest uptrends often become choppy before they ultimately end. It is highly unusual for an uptrend that is showing strong persistence to abruptly top out. The study below demonstrates this concept. The persistent uptrend of late has kept SPX above its

The financial equivalent of the famous Miller Lite, “tastes great, less filling” debate is the debate between traditional financial economics which uses risk theories to explain asset pricing and the newer behavioral finance field that uses human behavior to provide the explanations.

This is a summary of the recent performance of a wide range of excellent Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies, net of transaction costs. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies

BitMEX offers swaps that make it easy to lever a long or short bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). The main reason it trades so much is that they are based outside of US or EU control in the little archipelago-nation of Seychelles, and also that it transacts only in Bitcoin. This combination makes it

Developer: Dan Chesler, CTM, CTA. Concept: Trading strategy based on false breakouts. Research Goal: Performance verification. Specification: Table 1. Results: Figure 1-2. Trade Setup: Long Trades: The modified bullish hikkake pattern (a.k.a. the bullish “inside day false breakout”) consists of

In this week’s video, we discuss three posts. The first post discusses the new index analysis section on our site. The second post, written by Tommi, uses Hedge Funds’ past performance to identify if one can predict future Hedge Fund performance. The last post discusses Wes’ video examining an

In our inaugural Algo Bootcamp, we teamed up with our super-active community of traders and developed a long-only, always-in-the-market strategy for harvesting risk premia. It holds a number of different ETFs, varying their relative weighting on a monthly basis. We’re happy with it. However, the

Four recent asset allocation articles (tactical or otherwise) that you might have missed: 1. Bond ETFs in an Era of Rising Rates (Better Buy & Hold) This is our first post from our new platform BetterBuyAndHold.com. Bonds face stiff headwinds in the coming years, and many will underperform what

In this commentary, we ask whether we should consider rotating factor exposure based upon the business cycle. To eliminate a source of model risk, we assume perfect knowledge of future recessions, allowing us to focus only on whether prevailing wisdom about which factors work during certain economic

Despite the economical theory states that financial markets are efficient and investors are rational, a large ammount of research is about anomalies, where the result is different from the theoretical expectation. At Quantpedia, we deal with anomalies in the financial markets and we have identified

Quantitative Portfolio Management by Edward Qian, Ronald Hua, Eric Sorensen Expected Returns by Antti Ilmanen Quantitative Value by Wesley Gray and Tobias Carlisle Quantitative Momentum by Wesley Gray and Jack Vogel Dual Momentum Investing by Gary Antonacci Little Book that Still Beats the Market by

The US dollar had a slightly negative relationship with the stock market since 1996 Some equity factors are more sensitive to changes in the US dollar than others On average the sensitivity is zero, but as often averages are misleading INTRODUCTION The Economist’s Big Mac Index measures if

Implicit subsidies are premia paid by large financial markets participants for reasons other than risk-return optimization (view post here). Their estimation requires skill and a strong “quantamental system”. However, implicit subsidies are behind the popularity and temporary success of many

This is probably my favorite side project I’ve done. I’ve always been interested in algorithmic trading, and it’s exciting to code something that can potentially repay you in the form of cold, hard cash. The bot is written in Python and relies on two core libraries for the majority of its

Motivation: “Buy the dip” — it’s a frustratingly simple piece of advice. Like most pieces of advice, it’s easier said than done and the giver of such advice has probably not attempted to practice what they preach. It induces FOMO, which leads to the “hope trade”, when the “hope

Tax loss harvesting is widely promoted, but we think the benefits are generally misunderstood and often overstated.(1) • The benefits of loss harvesting arise from tax deferral, similar to the benefits of saving in a retirement account. • The benefits of tax deferral rise and fall with expected

Nowadays it is nearly impossible to step into a quant trading conference without being bombarded with flyers from data vendors and panel discussions on news sentiment. Our team at QTS has made a vigorous effort in the past trying to extract value from such data, with indifferent results. But the

Over my last 16 years of research, one of the most asked questions is should you not take trades before an earnings release. I could never answer this question because I did not have the data. I can easily recall trades were a stock came out with poor earnings and crashed 25%. But without testing