The paper investigates this issue by answering the following research questions: Can common robust risk premia (value, momentum, carry and defensive) enhance returns in Fixed Income investing? Do style-based Fixed Income portfolios present diversifying potential? Is a long/short implementation

The choice to lump sum invest (“LSI”) or dollar-cost average (“DCA”) is one fraught with emotion. Intuition tells us that LSI likely offers the best bet for long-term investors as markets, in general, tend to go up. However, can signals derived from simple trend models offer an edge? We find

Happy Memorial Day! The week of Memorial Day has shown some interesting seasonal tendencies over the years. But it has faltered greatly the last few. The chart below is one I have shown in the past, and have now updated. It examines SPX performance from the Friday before Memorial Day to the Friday

I examine whether a short-term reversal is attributed to past intraday or overnight price movements. The results show that intraday returns significantly reverse in the following week, while overnight returns do not, indicating that the short-term reversal is attributed to past intraday price

The Mean-Reversion factor is driven by volatility Allocating tactically when volatility is high generates an attractive payoff profile The strategy can be considered as a tail risk hedge for equity portfolios INTRODUCTION Our most recent research note focused on the Mean-Reversion factor (please see

In the past I have blogged about creating a currency strength indicator ( e.g. here, here and here ) and this post talks about a new twist on this idea. The motivation for this came about from looking at chart plots such as this, which shows Gold prices in the first row, Silver in the second and a

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

Is Fertility a Leading Economic Indicator? Kasey Buckles (University of Notre Dame), at al. March 28, 2018 Many papers show that aggregate fertility is pro-cyclical over the business cycle. In this paper we do something else: using data on more than 100 million births and focusing on within-year

A couple posts ago, I looked at Trading the Equity Curve and found interesting results but nothing that made me decide this works for me. Using the equity curve to decide when to stop trading a strategy just sounds like it should work. But for me it is always about testing. I cannot count how often

In this post, we will create an intraday momentum strategy and use QDA as a means of optimizing our strategy. We’ll begin by reviewing Linear Discriminant Analysis or LDA and how it is associated with QDA, gain an understanding of QDA and when we might implement this technique instead of Linear

There are three universal dimensions of return that drive the performance of all strategies—regardless of investment style or asset class: consistency, magnitude, and conviction. These dimensions serve as levers that can increase or decrease performance of any strategy. They also provide context

Assume you made a decision to invest in an active strategy based on, say, a backtest of the underlying process (to be clear, active means NOT passive market-cap weight in my context). Over the next few years, you sit in the strategy watching it underperform the passive benchmark. You are a

Because of the adaptive nature of position sizing, trend-following strategies can generate the positive skewness of their returns, when infrequent large gains compensate overall for frequent small losses. Further, trend-followers can produce the positive convexity of their returns with respect to

In this post, we’ll take a brief look at biclustering algorithms. They reveal easily interpretable patterns in our data and give us more information about the links between observations and features than simpler clustering algorithms usually do. We’ve already reviewed a number of non-supervised

The authors conduct a comprehensive analysis of five categories of technical trading rules (including channel break rules, filter rules, moving average rules, oscillator rules and support/resistance rules) using aggregate data from the Chinese stock market for the period 1997 to 2015. Do technical

Portfolio construction is a lot like cooking. There are two equally important elements: the ingredients and the recipe. The ingredients are the signals that are used to select investments. The recipe is the set of rules used to transform those signals into portfolio allocations. In factor investing,

Volatility spiked in the first quarter of 2018 when global stock markets declined, which was mainly due to concerns on proposed tariffs by the US government and rising interest rates. Since then markets recovered and volatility declined again, but higher interest rates are likely to have a negative

A new paper combines two key aspects of commodity pricing: [1] a rational pricing model based on the present value of future convenience yields of physical commodity holdings, and [2] the activity of financial investors in form of rational short-term trading and contrarian trading. Since convenience

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) indicates returns should go up linearly as beta increases (in other words, risk and return are positively related). However, as I’ve previously discussed, the historical evidence demonstrates that, while the slope of the security market line is generally

The new high in the Russell is notable, since it is the 1st major index to get there. But it does not necessarily mean the other indices will follow. In the study below I looked at SPX performance following instances of a fresh RUT breakout while SPX had still not broken out. 2018-05-17 Whether you

This year’s annual financial research “geekfest,” officially known as the American Finance Association Annual Meeting, assembles the world’s top-tier academic researchers to discuss their latest financial research. Source: Wes’s art studio and a photo by Daniel Cheung If you are looking to

Stocks can be ranked by alpha instead of stock returns Alpha Momentum generates a higher and more consistent performance than Price Momentum Momentum crashes are reduced significantly and risk-return ratios increase INTRODUCTION Alpha in finance is shrinking continuously as investors are getting

Benchmarking a trend-following strategy can be a difficult exercise in managing behavioral biases. While the natural tendency is often to benchmark equity trend-following to all-equities (e.g. the S&P 500), this does not accurately give the strategy credit for choosing to be invested when the

General concepts of Machine Learning 3 types of learning and basic terminology – Supervised learning. Learn a model from labeled training data that allows us to predict future or unknown data. Supervised refers to a set of sample where desired output signals (labels) are already known. Eg spam

The Fed’s System Open Market Account (SOMA is the account at the Fed that contains all of its bond purchase holdings. Fed SOMA data going back to 2003 can be downloaded from the New York Fed’s website. Over this time, there has been a strong relationship between the changes in the SOMA and

What does “optimal” mean, anyway? In the first part of this series, we discovered that the staked fraction of capital that yields the greatest compounded returns also yields a less-than-optimal level of drawdown. To realize the greatest return on capital, an investor in SPY since its inception

FX carry trading strategies only use short-term interest rates (and forward basis) as signal. Yet both theoretical and empirical research suggests that the whole relative yield curve contains important information on monetary policy and risk premia. In particular, the curvature of a yield curve

When dealing with data we (almost) always would like to have better and bigger sets. But if there’s not enough historical data available to test a given algorithm or methodology, what can we do? Our answer has been: creating it. How? By developing our own Synthetic Financial Time Series Generator.

I have shown Fed-based studies here at Quantifiable Edges since inception in 2008. And since 2010 I have closely tracked SOMA movement and its influence on the market in the Quantifiable Edges subscriber letter. This has proven extremely valuable in my research and trading. Now, after years of

We revisit a series of popular anomalies: seasonal, announcement and momentum. We comment on statistical significance and persistence of these effects and propose useful investment strategies to incorporate this information. We investigate the creation of a seasonal anomaly and trend model composed

We typically discuss trend following in the context of risk management for investors looking to diversify their diversifiers. While we believe that trend following is most appropriate for investors concerned about sequence risk, levered trend following may have use for investors pursuing growth. In

This research note was originally published at Alpha Architect. INTRODUCTION Mirror, mirror, on the wall – which is the fairest of them all? Recent commentary (to include a recent Barron’s article) seems to suggest that value is dead and may never come back. Of course, most of these comments

Albert Einstein once proclaimed that “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world” (allegedly, at least; people attribute all kinds of sayings to that guy). Let’s just assume that he did. This is the single most important reason why people participate in the markets. The magic of

This post will discuss the idea of the geometric Calmar ratio — a way to modify the Calmar ratio to account for compounding returns. So, one thing that recently had me sort of annoyed in terms of my interpretation of the Calmar ratio is this: essentially, the way I interpret it is that it’s a

Mirror, mirror, on the wall – which is the fairest of them all? Recent commentary (to include a recent Barron’s article) seems to suggest that value is dead and may never come back. Of course, most of these comments revolve around the price-to-book valuation metric, which, as the Barron’s

Friday the employment report will be released about an hour before the NYSE open. Employment days have an interesting history and they have contributed to some worthwhile studies over the years. Below is a chart of SPX performance on Employment Days going back to 1993. 2018-05-04 What I find

The Equity Risk Premium in 2018 John R. Graham and Campbell R. Harvey (Duke University) March 27, 2018 We analyze the history of the equity risk premium from surveys of U.S. Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) conducted every quarter from June 2000 to December 2017. The risk premium is the expected

The results of data analysis are only as good as the data you use. There are a variety of hedge fund data vendors out there. You may have access via your Bloomberg terminal, or perhaps you have purchased access to data from a well-known hedge fund data vendor. Regardless of your data source there

Please find below this month’s Wisdom State of Trend Following report. Performance is hypothetical – Chart for April: And the 12-month chart: Below are the summary stats: Horizon Return Ann. Vol. Last month 1.28% 9.77% Year To Date -5.03% 16.19% Last 12 months -9.94% 13.31% Last calendar year

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

Diversification is a key ingredient to a successful trend following program. While most popular trend following programs take a multi-asset approach (e.g. managed futures programs), we believe that single-asset strategies can play a meaningful role in investor portfolios. We believe that long-term

We recently published a research note on the relationship between factor returns and real GDP growth (Equity Factors & GDP Growth), which highlighted that some factors exhibit pro-cyclical while others have anti-cyclical characteristics. The Value and Size factors showed strong returns when

As we head towards the summer, the stock market has two long-term cycles converging that suggest it could be a rough ride. The 2 cycles are the “Best 6 Months” and the “Presidential Cycle”. I cover both of these cycles in detail in the Quantifiable Edges Market Timing Course. Here I will

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are establishing themselves as an investment asset and are often named the New Gold. This study, however, shows that the two assets could barely be more different. Firstly, we analyze and compare conditional variance properties of Bitcoin and Gold as well as other

Bloomberg columnist Mohamed El-Erian recently lamented that the discipline of economics “is divorced from real-world relevance and has lost credibility.” Among the problems he mentions currently afflicting the field are the following: The proliferation of simplifying assumptions that lead to an

In a previous post, we showed that the spot volatility index, VIX, has a strong mean reverting tendency. In this follow-up installment we’re going to further investigate the mean reverting properties of the VIX. Our primary goal is to use this study in order to aid options traders in positioning

Empirical evidence for 27 markets suggests that carry on interest rate swaps has been positively correlated with subsequent returns for the past two decades. Indeed, a naïve strategy following carry as signal has produced respectable risk-adjusted returns. However, this positive past performance

The authors discuss a variety of past research papers on time-series momentum but pay particular attention to the Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen (“MOP”) 2012 JFE paper, “Time Series Momentum.” This paper is arguably the first paper in recent memory to crack the top-tier academic journals with

In his 1998 second edition of “Stocks for the Long Run1”, Jeremy Siegel added a chapter called “Technical Analysis and Investing with the Trend”, where he explored simple trend rules to time the U.S. stock market. In the chapter, Dr. Siegel revealed that the simple trend following strategy

There are now hundreds of factors in what John Cochrane famously called the “zoo of factors.” However, there are only a small number that meet the requirements for investment that my co-author, Andrew Berkin, and I establish in our book, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing”: