The performance profile of Mean Reversion is extremely desirable to a lot of traders. Mean reversion trading strategies can produce high win rates and a smooth equity curve, however there are risks, which can result in giving back a large portion of profits, or of your trading account, some times in

The table below, taken from the newly released book I co-authored with Andrew Berkin, “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” shows the annual premium and Sharpe ratio for the equity factors of market beta, size, value, momentum, profitability and quality. It also shows the odds that

In this post, we will explore a feature of Python pandas package. We usually find queries about converting tick-by-tick data into OHLC (Open, High, Low and Close) frequently. This can be accomplished with minimal effort using pandas package. The OHLC data is used for performing technical analysis of

At a time when demand for income generating assets is at an all-time high, the yields on income generating assets are at, or near, all-time lows. While the headlines often speak to the number of Baby Boomers entering retirement, the more important statistic is actually the amount of wealth entering

A quick look at annual returns over the 100+ years of daily percent change (close to close) data that we have on dow jones 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import pandas as pd import numpy as np import datetime dj = local_csv("DjiaHist.csv", date_column = "Date",

This post will address what pairs trading is, how you can test for a pairs trading opportunity, and how to implement a pairs trading strategy. For information on the libraries I’ve used and how I structured my trading methods, I recommend starting with my previous post on the subject. Pairs

One of the TAA strategies that I have often been asked about is Antonacci’s Composite Dual Momentum (ACDM from now on). I never got around to tracking or writing about it but now the the folks at Allocate Smartly have it covered. In this post I’ll highlight the key details of the strategy and

Since my last post on the currency strength indicator I have been conducting a series of basic randomisation tests to see if the indicator has better than random predictive ability. The first test was a random permutation test, as described in Aronson's Evidence Based Technical Analysis book,

Research Affiliates has been churning out some great content lately. In their recent piece titled “Timing “Smart Beta” Strategies? Of Course! Buy Low, Sell High!” they examine some value based factor rotation strategies. Namely, they examined rotating among the factors that had the worst

If you want long-term outperformance, you must be able to stomach short-term underperformance. As William Bernstein said, “The most important investment ability is an emotional discipline.” Investing is a team sport that requires this discipline from both the investment manager (to stick to his

The results from last month’s trend following index were only slightly negative, which is quite surprising as most of other indices were sharply down, including The Wisdom Trading State of Trend Following report, which I write as a version 2 of this report. The principles for the index are the

I wanted to send you this article shortly after the end of the third quarter 2016 but, like a lot of things, it slipped my mind. What has worked in 2016 – value is not dead I will get right to the point about what strategy would have given you the best return so far in 2016. Here is a short

A picture is worth a thousand words or said a wise woman a hundred years ago. True to every word of the idiom, the beauty of visualization lies in how clearly it might convey multiple messages. Visualization of data is one of the key functions of a data scientist and decoding the visual messages is

Measuring Factor Exposures: Uses and Abuses Ronen Israel and Adrienne Ross (AQR Capital Management) September 19, 2016 A growing number of investors have come to view their portfolios (especially equity portfolios) as a collection of exposures to risk factors. The most prevalent and widely harvested

Election year is shaping up to be a bad year for trend following. October saw the State of Trend Following index post another successive down month. The current drawdown is still within the limits of the max value from the historical back-test run, but the Year-To-Date performance is now well into

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique used to reduce the dimensionality of a data set, finding the causes of variability and sorting them by importance. >How? If you have a set of observations (features, measurements, etc.) that can be projected on a plane (X, Y) such as: DataSet

CAPM was the first formal asset pricing model. Market beta was its sole factor. With the 1992 publication of their paper, “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns,” Eugene Fama and Kenneth French introduced a new-and-improved three-factor model, adding size and value to market beta as

This is a test of Gary Antonacci’s “Composite Dual Momentum” strategy from his seminal paper: Risk Premia Harvesting Through Dual Momentum. The model uses Antonacci’s unique approach to measuring momentum, which considers both absolute (aka time-series) and relative (aka cross-sectional)

On this episode, I have our very first guest from China; Derek Wong—he is the Director of Systematic Trading and Options at a private fund in Shanghai. Initially though, Derek got his start in the agricultural pits at the CBOT, then following on from this, he’s worked at various quant shops in

Most factor-based, otherwise known as Smart Beta, ETF strategies are based on a single concept like value or momentum. Over the last two years, the largest flows have been to ETFs investing in low volatility stocks. The most popular being the iShares Edge MSCI Min Vol USA ETF (USMV), which as of

A determination of peaks and troughs for any financial time-series seems to be always in high demand, especially in algorithmic trading. A number of numerical methods can be found in the literature. The main problem exists when a smart differentiation between a local trend and “global” sentiment

This study documents that earnings announcements serve as a reality check on short-term, fear and greed driven price development: stocks with extreme abnormal returns in the week before an earnings announcement experience strong price reversal around the announcement. A trading strategy that

At Alpha Architect, we are big fans of Value investing (and Momentum). In the past, Wes and I examined which valuation measure had the largest spread between Value and Growth firms. The evidence showed (updated results here) that Enterprise Multiples had the largest spread between Value and Growth

Benjamin Graham famously said that "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine." But this is not quite correct. Rather, in the short term, the market is a machine where investors "vote" about what the market will

As I wrote about last week, the absolute level of a firm’s stock price is arbitrary, as it can be easily manipulated by the firm through altering the number of shares outstanding (for example, by splitting the stock). Despite this obvious fact, the research into investor behavior has found a

This is a summary of the recent performance of a number 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 the

The power of strategic asset allocation is best harnessed when future asset class behavior is relatively certain and diversification opportunities abound. Uncertainty around rising rates and the current monetary policy environment may call both of these criteria into question. Holding all else

A sophisticated DFA-focused advisor asked us to conduct some research on the following question: Are there additional portfolio diversification benefits to combining concentrated portfolios of value and momentum stocks relative to combining less concentrated portfolios of value and momentum stocks?

This is the first post in a two-part series about the Hurst Exponent. Tom and I worked on this series together, but the awesome code presented throughout is all his. Thanks Tom! Mean-reverting time series have long been a fruitful playground for quantitative traders. In fact, some of the biggest

There are a number of different aspects to trading that we really need to get a handle on to increase our odds of success. Some aspects we often put a lot of thought and analysis into, and others we may not consider so carefully or at all, which could be impacting our trading results without us even

One of us (Marcos Lopez de Prado) has published the article Mathematics and economics: A reality check in the Journal of Portfolio Management. The article is open-access — there is no fee for viewing or downloading. Lopez de Prado argues that while economics is arguably one the most mathematical

Over the last few weeks I have been looking into creating a currency strength indicator as input to a Nonlinear autoregressive exogenous model. This has involved a fair bit of online research and I have to say that compared to other technical analysis indicators there seems to be a paucity of pages

It has historically paid to be a seller of volatility for at least two reasons... 1) Volatility is typically overpriced relative to realized volatility The chart on the left shows the VIX index (predicted volatility) relative to the forward realized volatility of the S&P 500, while the chart on

My recent research has been on the volatility Exchange Traded Products. My focus has been on long trades using VXX and XIV. Although VXX has a very strong downtrend, I am not a fan of developing short strategies on it due to the huge upside risk. I wrote about XIV here and expressed some of the

While Interactive Brokers provide arguably the most extensive retail-level API available for trading, the software is quite frustrating to work with. Rather than IB offering you an API endpoint on their server to interact with, you must run their Gateway or TWS program on your host and interact with

We receive multiple requests from readers looking to break into the finance industry. Quite often the reader is currently working in a traditional engineering job and looking to make a career switch. The question we often hear is “How does an engineer become a quantitative finance geek?” To

This post goes into an in depth analysis of the commitment of traders report and its usefulness for predicting price movements. The CFTC collects data on the daily positions of large participants in the commodity markets. The data is aggregated in the weekly COT report which is published every

In a previous article the monthly rebalance feature of the open-source backtesting library QSTrader was demonstrated on a simplistic equities/bonds ETF mix portfolio. In this article new streamlined code will be presented to allow straightforward modification of the portfolio weightings. In

The benefit of including commodities in individual investor portfolios is often up for debate, focusing on aspects such as expected returns, volatility, access, and diversification. While we think that commodities can add value if the risks are understood, many passive ETFs that offer commodity

We talked about the defacto standard for message communication in our previous article on FIX protocol. “The Financial Information Exchange (FIX) Protocol is a message standard developed to facilitate the electronic exchange of information related to securities transactions. It is intended for use

Financial research has uncovered many relationships between investment factors and stock returns. For investors, an important question is whether the publication of this research can impact the future size of factor premiums. Asking this question is crucial on two fronts. First, if anomalies are the

This post explores applying NEAT to trading the S&P. The learned strategy significantly out performs buying and holding both in and out of sample. Features: A key part of any machine learning problem is defining the features and ensuring that they’re normalised in some fashion. The features

Would it not be great to have the models for Protective Asset Allocation (PAA) and Global Protective Momentum (GPM) in Excel, so you can run your own backtests without AmiBroker? And not being limited to a pre-defined universe? Actually, now you can. Based on a foundation by InvestExel, Denis

The performance of trend following strategies can be ascribed to the difference between long-term and short-term realized variance. We revisit this general result and show that it holds for various definitions of trend strategies. This explains the positive convexity of the aggregate performance of

With more than 70% of the trading volumes in the US markets being automated, the rise of the algorithms seem more inevitable than ever before. The mechanical jobs are shifting to computers and only those who can tame the machines can rule the trade markets. Equipping oneself with the skills of

Eugene Fama’s Efficient Market Hypothesis argues that because stock prices follow a “random walk,” future price behavior cannot be predicted. In his seminal paper, “Random Walks in Stock Market Prices,” he explains the relationship between prices and fundamentals: If the random-walk theory

I. Trading Strategy Developer: John Ehlers and Ric Way. Source: Ehlers, J., Way, R. (2010). Zero Lag (Well, Almost). Concept: Trend following trading strategy based on moving average filters. Research Goal: To verify performance of the Zero Lag Moving Average Filter. Specification: Table 1. Results:

This is a test of Dick Stoken’s Active Combined Asset (ACA) strategy from his book Survival of the Fittest for Investors. This tactical asset allocation strategy uses price channel breakouts to choose between pairs of opposing risk and defensive asset classes. Results from 1988, net of transaction

Equal weighting asset allocation doesn’t look encouraging as a portfolio-design tool, based on last week’s preliminary analysis. Can we salvage equal weighting by expanding the opportunity set with a more granular mix of funds? In a word, no. As we’ll see, equal weighting across asset classes

The debate for the best way to build a multi-factor portfolio – mixed or integrated – rages on. Last week we explored whether the argument held that integrated portfolios are more capital efficient than mixed portfolios in realized return data for several multi-factor ETFs. This week we explore