I’m sure we’ve all heard about diversified stock and bond portfolios. In its simplest, most diluted form, it can be comprised of the SPY and TLT etfs. The concept introduced by Logical Invest, in a Seeking Alpha article written by Frank Grossman (also see link here), essentially uses a

We show that aggregate short interest is one of the strongest known predictors of the equity risk premium. High aggregate short interest predicts lower future equity returns at monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual horizons. In addition, aggregate short interest outperforms a host of popular

I was asked by a reader if I could illustrate the application of the Kalman Filter technique described in my previous post with an example. Let’s take the ETF pair AGG IEF, using daily data from Jan 2006 to Feb 2015 to estimate the model. As you can see from the chart in Fig. 1, the pair have been

According to Factset, S&P earnings growth for the calendar year 2015 is now expected to be just 2.9% (vs. 8.2% expected growth on Jan 1). Still, most people seem to believe that the S&P 500 will have a decent year. How frequently does it happen that earnings growth is weak but performance is

Notable about Friday’s market action is that it marked the 2nd day in a row that SPY posted an outside day. (An outside day is a day where the security or index makes both a higher high and a lower low than the day before.) Back-to-back are fairly rare. I last discussed this setup in the 1/10/2014

The Mojena Market Timing strategy (Mojena), developed and maintained by professor Richard Mojena, is a method for timing the broad U.S. stock market based on a combination of 11 monetary, fundamental, technical and sentiment indicators to predict changes in intermediate-term and long-term market

To install Systematic Investor Toolbox (SIT) please visit About page. The Quantitative Approach To Tactical Asset Allocation Strategy(QATAA) by Mebane T. Faber model is using 10 month moving average as a filter to switch strategy to cash. If at the month end the asset’s price is above the moving

Most automated trading systems (ATS) are built such that there are little to no interactions between component models. This is limiting. Here I am referring to a trading system as the overarching architecture that houses multiple individual models. Without interactions, each model is operating

An R Tutorial for Microsoft Excel Unsers (Revolutions) Backtesting A Basic ETF Rotation System in Excel (System Trader Success) Regulating CEO Narcissism (Bodt, Bollaert, and etal) Value, Momentum and market Timing (Filippou and Garcia-Ares) Speed of Information Diffusion

This post is a continuation of the prior post. In this post we will look at the backtest results for dynamic exits of 38 days-to-expiration (DTE) Iron Condors (IC), with 12 delta short strikes, with different profit and loss exits as a percentage of the initial credit. Recall that these RUT ICs were

So thanks to seeing Michael Kapler’s implementation of David Varadi’s percentile channels strategy, I was able to get a better understanding of what was going on. It turns out that rather than looking at the channel value only at the ends of months, that the strategy actually keeps track of the

Having decided that I'm going to use my mfe_mae indicator as a target for my neural net, over the last couple of months I've been doing some research on what would make good features for this target. In the course of this I've also decided that Particle swarm optimization would be a

Estimize is a crowd-sourced network which collects structured financial predictions submitted by its users, many of whom are professional analysts. Users can make predictions ranging from what next month’s unemployment rate will be to what a stock’s next quarterly earnings report will say. There

Fundamental Rule #1: For most investors, financial risk is singularly defined as the probability of not reaching financial goals. As such, the sole objective of investing is to minimize this risk. If you are an average investor with a typically basic understanding of investing, Rule #1 above will

One of the challenges with the cointegration approach to statistical arbitrage which I discussed in my previous post, is that cointegration relationships are seldom static: they change quite frequently and often break down completely. Back in 2009 I began experimenting with a more dynamic approach

Despite new highs, volatility still elevated $SPY $VIX

Good start of the year for the Wizards, who started the year with a collective +5.63% in January. Please see below for full individual results. Organisation / Fund Return YTD * AUM ** Abraham Trading1 4.93% 4.93% $272M Altis Partners2 9.67% 9.67% $335M Aspect Capital3 4.60% 4.60% $5,105M Beach

Ilya Kipnis at Quantstrat recently posted some R code attempting to replicate the ever-popular Percentile Channel Tactical Strategy. The results are similar but not exactly in line- which may have to do with the percentile function as Ilya has pointed out in the comments. In either case, the general

On November 2013 I published the first SA article on the Bond Rotation Strategy (BRS) (http://seekingalpha.com/article/1845022-the-sleep-well-bond-rotation-strategy-which-has-returned-15-percent-per-year-since-2008). Now, 15 months later, I am presenting an important update for this strategy. Even

Fast food has been on a roll as of late. The rate of Google searches for for the term “hamburger” is at all time highs, and investors in fast food stocks are enjoying tasty returns. Burger chains such as Red Robin (RRGB) and Jack in the Box (JACK) have more than tripled since 2011, with similar

Welcome Year of the Sheep (or goat or ram depending on location). Although the Chinese New Year is not a major holiday for North America, it most definitely is for our friends and business associates in China, Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Asia and Chinatowns around the world. Celebrations will

In a prior post, I waxed philosophical about the importance of remaining skeptical of the assumptions that underlie portfolio construction. Another commonly accepted assumption is that rebalancing is a value-add activity. The underlying theory here is that assets tend to mean-revert over time, so by

I’ve been working at The University of Manchester for almost a decade and will be leaving at the end of this week! A huge part of my job was to support a major subset of Manchester’s site licensed application software portfolio so naturally I’ve made use of a lot of it over the years. As of

Last week we presented some evidence that the total daily trading volume for SPY could be predicted from the first minute’s trading volume. We accomplished this using an Archimedean copula, a mathematical construct for modeling multivariate data. Interpreting a copula from an intuitive standpoint

Happy Chinese New Year! May I wish you all a fruitful and prosperous Year of the Sheep in 2015 – especially to my new friends from Hong Kong that I met on my trip there this past December where I gave an evening seminar and a full-day workshop all organized be my colleagues at Earlthorn. In some

In the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2015, there is a section dedicated to industry group analysis. Beyond an interesting history lesson about the rise and fall of certain industries, the piece demonstrated the strength of both momentum- and value-based investing when it came to

This post will detail an attempt at replicating David Varadi’s percentile channels strategy. As I’m only able to obtain data back to mid 2006, the exact statistics will not be identical. However, of the performance I do have, it is similar (but not identical) to the corresponding performance

Our DO-IT-YOURSELF Investing Tool is Live! You can build your own stock selection and asset allocation models using our DIY Investing tools. How to Access the Tool? Step 1: Click "Our tools" tab from our main website page.

I sent this to The Idea Farm last week – this is always my #1 read of the year, the CSFB Global Investment Returns Yearbook! This is the annual update to my favorite investment book,Triumph of the Optimists. Included this year is a near 100 year backtest on industry rotation based on value and

Historical search volume presents a wealth of information. Recently, we presented a way to use Google Trends to predict stock market directiontsla_real_vol_, looked at the correlation between searches for the term “stock market” to the value of the VIX, and used searches for “farmville” to

In case you were not aware of it, I have a “thing” for seasonal trends. Certain commodities are especially well known for exhibiting “seasonal” – or “cyclical”, if you prefer – trends. I’ve talked a bit recently about crude oil and energies here and here. Another market that fits

In this post we will look at the backtest results for dynamic exits of 38 days-to-expiration (DTE) Iron Condors (IC), with 12 delta short strikes, with different profit and loss exits. For some background on how these results are presented, please review the overview and prior 38 DTE posts at: RUT

Michael Kapler of the always excellent Systematic Investor blog has moved his publishing to GitHub to make it easier to post code. This has flown under the radar (even to me), and we are all grateful that he is back to publishing. He was able to reproduce the “Simple Tactical Asset Allocation with

The term "black swan" has become synonymous with "rare event" – but the original concept proposed by Nassim Taleb was a bit more nuanced. The term came from the latin phrase "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno": a rare bird in the lands and very much like a

Welcome back to Interviewing the Quants. This will be the second interview in the series. Many of you might know our guest from his trading at Nightly Patterns (http://nightlypatterns.wordpress.com). His name is Marco Simioni and he’s agreed to give us greater insight into what he does and who he

I’ve been analyzing a 60/40 US stock/bond portfolio in R in a series of posts and today’s installment picks up from the previous post by adding a global strategy. The goal is enhancing the 60/40’s return while keeping risk at a comparable if not lesser level. Overly ambitious? Perhaps, but

Our Asset Allocation Backtesting Tool is Live! You can build and backest your own allocation portfolio using our "Allocation Architect" tool. How to Access the Tool? Step 1: Click "Our tools" tab from our main website page. 1.1 Click to enlarge. Step 2: If you already have a

If you currently use a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel for data analysis, you might be interested in taking a look at this tutorial on how to transition from Excel to R by Tony Ojeda. The tutorial explains how to use R functions in place of Excel formulas, including tools like =AVERAGE and

US News laundry lists their top 10 "Value Investing Funds," or Value Investing ETFs, in their recent article: http://money.usnews.com/funds/etfs/rankings/value-funds The criteria (and weighting) for selecting so-called "Value" ETFs are outlined below: Expense Ratio (30%) Tracking

We construct a strategy based on a single indicator – percentage of close price within the range of [Past N days Low, Past N days High]. First we calculate the indicator (pBand variable below) require(quantmod) getSymbols('SPY') Lookback=10 HLC=SPY[,c(

In this article I describe the Gator Oscillator and how it can be used as part of a pyramid entry trading system. I show the results of a Gator trading strategy on the S&P500 Index from 2000-2015. Pyramid Entry Systems It is tough to find good trades. In most markets at most times there will

In his latest book (Algorithmic Trading: Winning Strategies and their Rationale, Wiley, 2013) Ernie Chan does an excellent job of setting out the procedures for developing statistical arbitrage strategies using cointegration. In such mean-reverting strategies, long positions are taken in

Last week, CNBC profiled the inspirational story of Ronald Read, a gas station attendant and janitor from Vermont who amassed an $8MM fortune simply by investing portions of his small salary into high-quality, dividend-paying U.S. equities. Given the sampling of names that Read is reported to have

We’re proud to announce, thanks to the support of the community, the LEAN Algorithmic Trading Engine is now 100% open source. You have the freedom to connect any data source, execute through any brokerage and design any algorithm 100% locally. Moment of our Open Sourcing, Jan 12th 2015 It’s an

Posted by - Sanz Prophet Historically and up to 2013, equities have exhibited a positive bias during the end of the month. Here is an example of buying the SPY etf on the first down-day after the 23rd and selling on the first up-day of the next month. Trading is at the same day close.

Given yesterday’s post showing the link between trading volume and stock valuation, it would seem appropriate to investigate the ways in which we can predict today’s volume. Its all well and good to know that high volume coincides with volatility and falling prices but how do we know we are

This post introduces the Quarterly Tactical Strategy, introduced by Cliff Smith on a Seeking Alpha article. It presents a variation on the typical dual-momentum strategy that only trades over once a quarter, yet delivers a seemingly solid risk/return profile. The article leaves off a protracted

Executive Summary: Dual Momentum, a concept pioneered by Gary Antonacci, intelligently combines elements of two types of momentum investing strategies -- absolute and relative momentum -- into a comprehensive asset allocation system. His paper shows that the combination of time-series momentum and

The first day of S&P 500 February expiration week has been up in four of the last five years. This is a respectable streak, but still short of the 12-year winning streak that lasted from 1994 to 2005. Nonetheless, the first trading day of option expiration week is clearly bullish with S&P

New highs, but with an asterisk? $QQQ