This is the third post in my series on transforming data into alpha. If you haven't yet see the data management and guide to feature engineering, please take a minute to read those first... This post is going to delve into the mechanics of feature selection to help choose between the many

Defensive Asset Allocation (DAA) builds on the framework designed for Vigilant Asset Allocation (VAA) For DAA the need for crash protection is quantified using a separate “canary” universe instead of the full investment universe as with VAA DAA leads to lower out-of-market allocations and hence

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, the historical evidence demonstrates that, while the slope of the security market

A couple of weeks back I published the first part of a full-chapter excerpt from my new book, Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return. Here’s the second half of this two-part excerpt of Chapter 5, which reviews the basics for

This post is the first of a series where we will be providing some of our own thoughts and commentary the conversations we had in the first season of our new podcast. This post covers our conversation with Adam Butler, which you can listen to here. 1:57 - Corey introduces Adam via a blog post Adam

This is the seventh in my Hedge Fund Hacks series. It is a natural follow-up to my sixth hack on Hedge Fund Return Predictability in which I identified the following conundrum: You need a track record of 8+ years of monthly data to have reasonable confidence in a manager’s expected returns. The

Building profitable portfolios has been giving investment managers headaches for decades. Many approaches have been used up until now, some of the most well-known being Markowitz’s Efficient Frontier and Risk Parity. Today, we are presenting a brand new approach to this recurrent problem developed

Factor portfolios are typically created by equal weighting stocks The impact of single stocks is therefore reduced compared to market-cap weighted indices The FAANG stocks impacted factors differently INTRODUCTION The famous FAANG quintet of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google has driven

I looked at the chart for SPY just now, and thought, “Huh…two days in a row that have gapped up. Wonder if that’s significant in any way?” By “gap,” I mean that today’s low was higher than yesterday’s high. When this happens two days in a row, does it mean we should use quintuple

What causes a stock’s price to move? A great question, and one that puzzles most market observers every day. Since this is puzzling, it is an entertaining topic to discuss–enter CNBC and the financial media. In the short-run, stocks prices can move for a variety of reasons … noise trading,

Just about anyone who’s looked at a multi-year chart for a long volatility fund like Barclays’ VXX has thought about taking the short side side of that trade. VelocityShares’ ZIV is an Exchange Traded Product (ETP) that allows you to hold a short volatility position while avoiding some of the

This paper studies the efficiency and price formation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency markets. First, there are large recurrent arbitrage opportunities in cryptocurrency prices relative to fiat currencies across exchanges that often persist for several days or weeks. These price dispersions

One of the ongoing research projects inside the Robot Wealth community involves an FX strategy with some multi-week hold periods. Such a strategy can be significantly impacted by the swap, or the cost of financing the position. These costs change over time, and we decided that for the sake of more

I was moved to write this by a post on LinkedIn, which you can find here, and which is worth quoting (and thanks to Helder Palaro for pointing me at this): "Volatility tends to “cluster”. Recent high(low) volatility is followed by high(low) volatility in the near-term (ARCH). VT says lever

The paper investigates the following research question: Can machines allocate capital in the classic style of a value investor like Benjamin Graham or Warren Buffett? What are the Academic Insights? By connecting two broad and disparate areas (the innovative AI domain and the more old-fashioned

The rally on Friday was accompanied by a sizable drop in the VIX (and even more so for the VXO, which is the old calculation for the VIX). This triggered some old studies for me in which I noted that big drops in the VXO have had much different connotations depending on whether SPX is in a long-term

Slight positive uptick in the State of Trend Following Performance report last month, leaving the YTD performance in negative territory at half-time. Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: June return: 0.25% YTD return: -2.67% Below is the chart

Crowded factors exhibit higher drawdowns than uncrowded factors A multi-metric approach can be successfully applied to measure factor crowding Effective in reducing factor drawdowns and volatility, but less meaningful for returns INTRODUCTION Architects devoted to creating large public facilities

With the end of another quarter, the time of performance commentaries is upon us. We generally find most performance commentaries to be devoid of much substance, taking a “heads I’m skilled, tails I’m unlucky” mentality to describing short-term results. While quants may be reluctant to offer

As Warren Buffet once said: “the stock market is a manic depressive.” The market can be full of euphoria and greed one moment, and switch to fear and panic the next. This can often be a time of danger and high-risk for some traders, but for other traders it’s a time of immense opportunity.

Seasonal fluctuations are evident for many commodity prices. However, their exact size can be quite uncertain. Hence, seasons affect commodity futures curves in two ways. First, they bias the expected futures price of a specific expiry month relative that of other months. Second, their uncertainty

In a provocative new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, quantum physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the scientific world in general, and the field of physics in particular, has repeatedly clung to notions that have been rejected by experimental evidence, or has pursued

June 2018 Trend Following: UP +0.48% / YTD: -6.01% Please find this month’s report of the Wisdom State of Trend Following. Performance is hypothetical. Chart for June: And the 12-month chart: Below are the summary stats: Horizon Return Ann. Vol. Last month 0.48% 13.45% Year To Date -6.01% 15.36%

am a recent Computer Science graduate from IIT Kanpur. I first came to know about QuantQuest through IITK placement cell during our final year placement season. During my mid-semester recess when I was chilling out at my home, I received an email from Ms. Chandini Jain (founder of Auquan) with the

There are many problems that a data scientist encounters when “fighting” financial data for the first time: nothing is normally distributed, most problems are tough (low signal to noise ratio) and non-stationary high-dimensional time series are ubiquitous. In Quantdare we have spoken many times

Recent studies show that volatility-managed equity portfolios realize higher Sharpe ratios than portfolios with a constant notional exposure. We show that this result only holds for “risk assets”, such as equity and credit, and link this to the so-called leverage effect for those assets. In

This is a summary of the recent performance of a wide range of excellent tactical asset allocation strategies. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies are broadly representative of

In practice, investors and institutions alike have spending patterns that makes the sequence of market returns a relevant risk factor. All else held equal, investors would prefer to make contributions before large returns and withdrawals before large declines. For retirees making constant

As I wrote before, Bitcoin volatility is quite different from volatility of other assets. I will continue with the same topic here. Bitcoin prices shot up to all-time highs this winter, and have sharply declined since. When an equity index declines, volatility typically moves up, but in the case of

Factor performance in 1H 2018 is comparable to 2017 The Size factor has taken the lead, likely reflecting the threat of global trade wars Value has generated the most negative returns across regions INTRODUCTION We present the performance of seven well-known factors on an annual basis for the last

What are the research questions? Using eVestment, a source of data for asset managers, the authors evaluate U.S. fundamental and quantitative managers, specifically core, growth and value styles. Eighteen strategy types (six in each style) were identified and results calculated using averages for

I was fortunate enough to talk about my latest open source work with Brian Peterson at the R/Finance conference in Chicago just less than 1 month ago. It was my first time to the conference, and I will be back again for sure. The topics and their presentations are available on the website. With this

As many readers of this blog are aware, on this weekend I will be doing a 150 mile bike ride from Boston, MA around Cape Cod to its tip in Provincetown for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. I have offered anyone that donates any amount of money a copy of the QE Fed Day MS Ride package, which includes

In his famous book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman described one common example of a behavioral finance bias: "You are offered a gamble on the toss of a [fair] coin. If the coin shows tails, you lose $100. If the coin shows heads, you win $110. Is this

Here is a link to our podcast on Flirting with Models. Today I am speaking with Jack Vogel, co-CIO of boutique ETF issuer Alpha Architect. I’ve known Jack for some time now and was particularly excited to bring him on the show for two reasons. The first, which you will quickly learn in the

On Wednesday the bulls tried to make a move higher and failed, making for a higher high and a lower close. On Thursday the opposite happened. The bears failed in their attempt at a move lower. A study from the Quantifinder looked at 2-day moves like this. I found results to be substantially

I began my investment career in 1974. In 1976 I left a large retail brokerage firm to join a premier investment bank. I had both retail and institutional clients. So I had a well-rounded knowledge of Wall Street. The 1970s was soon after the dark ages of investing. Modern portfolio theory existed in

When Does Cap-Weighting Outperform? Factor-Based Explanations Roger G Clarke (Ensign Peak Advisors), et al. May 1, 2018 Equity mutual fund performance can be partially explained by commonly-followed equity market factors, and the proposition that fund managers in the aggregate have more

Reliable data makes for more accurate models. It is not the end of the world if there are minor discrepancies although data does need to be representative to build models and make good assumptions. Common data errors are known to be found at market closing times. We want the auction price not the

Here’s an excerpt from my new book, Quantitative Investment Portfolio Analytics In R: An Introduction To R For Modeling Portfolio Risk and Return, which was published last week. In this two-part excerpt of Chapter 5, we’ll look at a basic procedure for downloading factor premia from Professor

The superior performance of low-beta and low-volatility stocks was documented in the literature back in the 1970s — by Fischer Black (in 1972) among others — even before the size and value premiums were “discovered.” The low-beta/low-volatility anomaly has been demonstrated to exist in

For those of us working with time series, the autocorrelation function (ACF) is a fundamental tool to understand how the values in a series correlate with others certain distance away. Indeed, we could even say that autocorrelation plots (a.k.a correlogram) are probably the most common

I am frequently asked what data provider I use and recommend for stocks. I have been using Norgate Data for four years and recommend them to anyone looking for data. This review will focus on US Stocks and AmiBroker integration which is what I use daily. Norgate Data has data for the Australian and

It's finally here: the first season of the Flirting with Models podcast, the show that aims to pull back the curtain and meet the people who design, develop, and manage quantitative investment strategies. This season – titled Boutiques & Bloggers – is a series of conversations with

The yearly R in Finance conference is one of my favorites: 1. Titans of the R community are there every year. This year the founder of Rstudio (but much more really), JJ Allaire was a keynote speaker. He gave a talk about Machine Learning with TensorFlow and R. 2. Single track. I like everything,

The Value factor has generated flat returns over the last decade, which has been challenging for the most dedicated Value investors. Given that the average mutual fund holding period is three years, investors might question if the Value factor has become a contrarian call, which arguably makes it

Farre-Mensa and Ljungqvist (2016) observe that many measures of financial constraints used in the literature are flawed. In fact, to date, it remains an empirical challenge to quantify them. The authors attempt at solving this problem by answering the following research questions: Can textual

In order for active management to outperform passive investing, a manager needs both skill and opportunity. Opportunities can come in the form of entering and exiting the market, security selection, and portfolio construction. However, even if these opportunities can be quantified, developing a

Initial coin offerings (ICOs), sales of cryptocurrency tokens to the general public, have recently been used as a source of crowdfunding for startups in the technology and blockchain industries. We create a dataset on 4,003 executed and planned ICOs, which raised a total of $12 billion in capital,