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Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/23/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Monday, 03/23/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Where Tactical Asset Allocation Stands Now (Monday 03/23) [Allocate Smartly]

    Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) as a whole continues to weather the fallout well, significantly paring down losses versus a conventional buy & hold portfolio. Individual strategies vary widely. We track 50+ published TAA strategies, allowing us to draw some broad conclusions about TAA as a style. In the table below we show the MTD/YTD returns of these 50+ strategies as of Friday, 03/20: How we
  • What the Trend [Flirting with Models]

    In this research note, we explore the performance of simple trend equity strategies and funds in the recent market rout. We find a significant dispersion in realized performance, with some strategies shifting entirely to cash at the end of February and some remaining entirely invested. We explain why we would expect different strategies to behave differently based upon their model specification.
  • Markov Model – An Introduction [Quant Insti]

    In this post, we will learn about Markov Model and review two of the best known Markov Models namely the Markov Chains, which serves as a basis for understanding the Markov Models and the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) that has been widely studied for multiple purposes in the field of forecasting and particularly in trading. In this post we will try to answer the following questions: What is a Markov
  • Thematic Investing: Thematically Wrong? [Factor Research]

    Thematic investing can be viewed as performance chasing with a narrative A systematic approach to thematic investing would have underperformed the stock market Thematic hedge fund managers have not generated attractive returns PERFORMANCE CHASING WITH A NARRATIVE? Thematic investing is like venture capital for asset managers. For every 10 products launched, most fail to generate interest from

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/21/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Saturday, 03/21/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Calculating a VIX6M Style Index back to 1990 Reveals Some Volatility Trends [Six Figure Investing]

    The Cboes VIX, VIX3Msm (93-day), and VIX6Msm (184-day) indexes enable us to quantify volatility term structures but until now, historical analyses between VIX style indexes have been limited to dates after December 2001 in the case of VIX3M and January 2008 for VIX6M. This post introduces the results of VIX6M style calculations back to 1990 and reviews issues and trends that were revealed. In
  • What we have been reading to stay calm [Two Centuries Investments]

    This crisis is bringing out the best in many people. When the stakes become real, alertness is heightened, thinking is crystallized. Here is an eclectic collection of thought pieces weve enjoyed over the past two weeks. Bin There Done That by Morgan Stanley Ample research shows that most experts do not make great forecasts. BIN Model, where B refers to bias, I to information,
  • Rebalancing history [OSM]

    Our last post on rebalancing struck an equivocal note. We ran a thousand simulations using historical averages across different rebalancing regimes to test whether rebalancing produced better absolute or risk-adjusted returns. The results suggested it did not. But we noted many problems with the testsnamely, unrealistic return distributions and correlation scenarios. We argued that if we used
  • Cuemacro s TCA software is now open sourced [Cuemacro]

    Its a difficult time at present around the world. You obviously dont need me to tell you that. Lets hope that we can conquer the coronavirus soon and we all give thanks for those on the front lines, working in hospitals caring for the sick, those working in supermarkets and all those keeping society going through this difficult period. In the meantime, like most you reading this, Ive
  • How loss aversion increases market volatility and predicts returns [SR SV]

    Loss aversion means that people are more sensitive to losses than to gains. This asymmetry is backed by ample experimental evidence. Loss aversion is not the same as risk aversion, because the aversion is disproportionate towards drawdowns below a threshold. Importantly, loss aversion implies that risk aversion is changing with market prices. This means that the compensation an investor requires

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/18/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Wednesday, 03/18/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Is robustness an ally? [Quant Dare]

    Many investment strategies use the mean like an official parameter. However, this estimator can be considered non-robust, being easily affected by outliers. But if we take a look at almost any financial series, we will notice that outliers may appear more often than we might think. Introduction In this post, we will try to study what happens if we introduce a robust parameter (such as the median)

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/17/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Tuesday, 03/17/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Risk Parity in the Time of COVID [Invest Resolve]

    Consistent with misapprehensions expressed during other recent market crises, there has been a chorus of alarmist speculation about the actions and state of risk-parity strategies during the current crash. We felt it would be helpful to revisit the concept of risk parity and take a snapshot of how a typical global risk parity strategy might have been expected to behave this year. As a quick
  • The Use and Value of Financial Advice for Retirement Planning: Part 1/2 [Alpha Architect]

    What are the Research Questions? Planning for the expenditures needed to fund a successful retirement is one of the most important tasks individuals face, and its not an easy one. In fact, it is pretty common (and smart) for some investors to turn to a professional advisor to help guide them through the several aspects of the retirement planning process. 1 According to Foerster et al. (2017),

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/16/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Monday, 03/16/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Tactical Strategies and The Anatomy of A Bear Market [Invest Resolve]

    The last few weeks have been some of the toughest in recent memory for investors, as we have observed an intense global market selloff that began in late February and continued into early March of 2020 (as of the writing of this report). Equity markets have experienced the steepest losses since 2008, at the depths of the Global Financial Crisis. As fears surrounding the outbreak of the COVID-19
  • Bitcoin in a Time of Financial Crisis [Quantpedia]

    This is the article we had prepared around 1-2 weeks ago (data sample starts in October 2014 and ends on 4th of March 2020). But then coronavirus hit our country (Slovak Republic), and we were doing a lot of crisis management tasks and therefore were not able to publish it on time. Now, after the Bitcoins negative performance between 5th of March and current date, the conclusion of our short
  • Vortex Indicator: Trading Strategy Review & Sensitivity Test [Oxford Capital]

    Developer: Etienne Botes and Douglas Siepman. Source: The Vortex Indicator. Stocks & Commodities, January 2010. Concept: Momentum trading strategy based on Vortex Indicator. Research Goal: Performance verification of momentum signals. Specification: Table 1. Results: Figure 1-2. Trade Setup: Long Setup: Positive Vortex Indicator (+VI) crosses above Negative Vortex Indicator (VI). Short
  • EM Debt: To Hold, or Not To Hold? [Factor Research]

    Hard currency emerging market debt outperformed local currency EM debt since 2013 EM government and corporate debt traded comparably Adding EM debt to a traditional US equity-bond portfolio would have generated only marginal benefits INTRODUCTION Forecasting the short-term outlook for the S&P 500 is like predicting the weather in Scotland. The likelihood of getting it right is not particularly

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/15/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Sunday, 03/15/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Petra on Programming: The Smoothed OBV [Financial Hacker]

    In his article in the S&C April 2020 issue, Vitali Apirine proposed a modified On Balance Volume indicator (OBVM). The hope was that OBVM crossovers and divergences make great trade signals, especially for stock indices. I got the job to put that to the test. The original OBV indicator was invented by Joseph Granville in 1963. It differs from other indicators insofar as it takes trade volume
  • Speeding up your Python code [R Trader]

    I know this topic is addressed on a very regular basis on the web but Im pretty sure sharing my experience will help some finance people. Im currently working on Limit Order Book modeling. This means dealing with fairly big data sets. I have around 1 million observations per stock and per day. So modeling the behavior of the order book just over 10 days is already a decent big data exercise.

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/14/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Saturday, 03/14/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Rebalancing ruminations [OSM]

    Back in the rebalancing saddle! In our last post on rebalancing, we analyzed whether rebalancing over different periods would have any effect on mean or risk-adjusted returns for our three (equal, naive, and risky) portfolios. We found little evidence that returns were much different whether we rebalanced monthly, quarterly, yearly, or not at all. Critically, as an astute reader pointed out, if
  • Low Volatility-Momentum Versus Value-Momentum Factor Portfolios [Alpha Architect]

    If an investor would state today that in ten or twenty years most portfolios would include an allocation to cryptocurrencies, they would likely be laughed at. However, a similar response would have been encountered in the Internet Bubble and someone proposed to invest in low-risk stocks. During that time, investors were ignoring boring companies like REITs or utilities and were plowing into

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/13/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Friday, 03/13/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Where Tactical Asset Allocation Stands Now (Thursday 03/12) [Allocate Smartly]

    Broadly speaking, Tactical Asset Allocation has weathered this storm reasonably well, but the last two days have been tough and we are by no means out of the woods. We track 50+ published TAA strategies, allowing us to draw some broad conclusions about TAA as a style. In the table below we show the MTD/YTD returns of these 50+ strategies: TAA began reducing exposure to risk assets back in January,

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/12/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Thursday, 03/12/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • A Vector Autoregression Trading Model [Robot Wealth]

    The vector autoregression (VAR) framework is common in econometrics for modelling correlated variables with bi-directional relationships and feedback loops. If you google vector autoregression youll find all sorts of academic papers related to modelling the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on various aspects of the economy. This is only of passing interest to traders. However, if we

Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/11/2020

This is a summary of links featured on Quantocracy on Wednesday, 03/11/2020. To see our most recent links, visit the Quant Mashup. Read on readers!

  • Do Insider Trades Provide Insights into Future Returns? [Alpha Architect]

    The volume of work that has been done on insider transactions is not inconsequential, weve covered a variety of research on the topic in several blog posts just a few of which are here and here. This is the first time we observe corporate insiders ability to overcome biases as an indicator of future returns though. Because corporate insiders are also human, they too can be subject to
  • Trading Multiple Strategies [Alvarez Quant Trading]

    Using strategy diversification is one of the easiest ways to improve the performance and reduce risk of your overall portfolio. Trading one strategy is risky because you never know when it may stop working or simply go into a period of under-performance. Given two strategies to trade, the questions I have are, what is the performance of trading them together? What percentage of the total portfolio
  • What to Do When Alpha Becomes Beta [Alpha Architect]

    In this article, the author argues that alternative risk premia (ARP) strategies undergo an evolution that begins with their inception as a pure alpha -based strategy, continuing its metamorphosis into a pure beta strategy. The inevitable transformation is brought on by a number of factors and also presents an opportunity for managers and investors alike to reassess their position on the