We’ve spent the past few posts building up the Starter System laid out in Rob Carver’s book, Leveraged Trading. We’ve gone from a simple moving average cross-over model, to a volatility targeting system with multiple instruments and time frames that dynamically sizes and re-positions your

John Ehlers strikes again. The TASC January 2022 issue features another indicator supposedly improved with Hann windowing – the RSIH, a RSI with Hann flavour. Can it beat the standard RSI? The RSI is basically the normalized difference of price up/down movements. And its here presented Hann

We can use self-organizing maps for clustering data, trained in an unsupervised way. Let’s see how. This week we are going back to basics, as we will see one of the first successfully deployed machine learning algorithms: self-organizing maps (SOM, sometimes also called Kohonen maps). This is an

When I wrote my first book a decade ago, I didn’t expect it to get much attention, or sales. I was in the wrong country, of the wrong nationality, I had shunned social media and was nearly invisible on the internet. On top of these obstacles, I tried out a whole new style of writing trading books.

A long time ago, before elevators were a thing, a simple mechanism was used to get the miners in and out of the mines. This mechanism is called a “Man Engine” (or “Fahrkünst” in German language) and works on a simple principle of two reciprocating ladders and stationary platforms. The two

Whatever kind of strategy you're employing as an investor, an invaluable tool for determining it's usefulness is testing. Not simply backtesting on historical data or stress testing on synthetic data – that's the easy part. The fun and playful part. A much more important test comes

In quantitative finance, we very often deal with a sample mean and sample standard deviation being derived given a vector or a time-series or any other (1-dimensional) dataset. For many of us these calculations are so obvious that only a few understand the principles standing behind the scene.

A wide range of strategies are marketed as beneficiaries of rising interest rates Portfolios are comprised of equities, bonds, options, long as well as short positions However, only financial services companies and short bonds offer a positive correlation to interest rates INTRODUCTION In this year,

A short code snippet to apply PCA on stocks returns. No secret sauce is used here to clean the empirical covariance matrix. This blog post will mostly serve as a basis for comparing several flavours of PCA and their impact on ex-ante volatility estimation. We may look in future blog posts into

The risk reversal premium manifests as an overpricing of out-of-the-money put options relative to out-of-the-money call options with equal expiration dates. The premium apparently arises from equity investors’ demand for downside protection, while most market participants are prohibited from

It is indisputable that the data are changing financial markets – computing power has increased, allowing to rise the trends of ML/AI and big data (number of possible predictors or granularity) or HFT strategies. Indeed, not all the datasets are worth the time of academics, investors or traders,

Pandas is a great tool for time series analysis of financial market data. Because pandas DataFrames and Series work well with a date/time based index, they can be used effectively to analyze historical data. By financial market data, I mean data like historical price information on a publicly traded

“Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.” S. Klarman “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easier person to fool.” R. Feynman In this brief note, our goal is to show readers, as objectively as possible, the

Average stock market returns are similar regardless if volatility was high or low However, given skewed returns, it was not attractive investing when volatility was high Unfortunately implementing a strategy to avoid high volatility periods is emotionally challenging INTRODUCTION Active fund

Most readers are familiar with p-hacking and the so-called replication crisis in financial research (see here, here, and here for differing views). Some claim that these research challenges are driven by a desire to find ‘positive’ results in the data because these results get published, whereas

Great book, I absolutely recommend. Precise and concise (less than 200 pages). This book will especially be useful to grads or analysts in the early stages of their career. A junior analyst/quant/data scientist who masters the content of this book will definitely be useful in a pod of fundamental

An asset-pricing model is a claim about which optimization problem people are solving when they choose their investment portfolios. One way to make such a claim testable is to derive a condition that should hold if people were actually solving this optimization problem. And the standard approach to

The current workhorse asset pricing model is the Fama-French five-factor model (2015), which added the profitability and investment factors to their original (1992) three factors of market beta, size, and value—increasing the model’s explanatory power. Nusret Cakici and Adam Zaremba contribute

I realise that I've never actually sat down and described my fully automated futures trading system in all it's detail; despite having runit for around 7.5 years now. That isn't because I want to keep it a secret - far from it! I've blogged or written books about all the various

In this post we will show how the properties of a triangle can be used to intuitively obtain insights about the volatilities and correlations of currency pairs. Once the dominant branch of mathematics, geometry plays now a secondary role. However, its graphical arguments still seem to be better

Systematically trading a single instrument can be a bit dull. There are times when your chosen stock isn’t trending or doing much. So your system just sits there and waits…and waits..and waits. Obviously we don’t want to trade just to trade – that’s a good way to start losing money. But if

Traditional finance academics lean towards risk-based models to explain why various return characteristics, such as value and momentum, predict returns. But there is another school of thought often referred to as ‘behavioral finance.’ This field has some of its own ideas (see below) on why

While the holiday season has long been regarded as a time of excess, folks this year are bracing for another challenge besides annual waistline expansion: price inflation. As we gather with family and friends for the holidays in coming weeks many are predicting that this year’s turkey will be the

With a long-term time horizon, investors should consider alternatives to the market-cap weighted equity indices A valuation-based approach for creating an equities portfolio may seem more sensible Using EBITDA / EV yield seems to avoid some of the quality issues of other value metrics INTRODUCTION

Hendrik Bessembinder published a fascinating paper, which finds that nearly all publicly traded stocks in the U.S. — if held as buy and hold investments — underperform Treasury bills. This finding is incredibly surprising and interesting. Of course, when bold claims are made, they tend to

Today’s study is one of several that will be appearing in the Quantifiable Edges Subscriber Letter in a few hours. Quantifiable Edges Black Friday sale has been extended through Cyber-Monday. Act now to take advantage. After Monday – its gone. Black Friday was a tough one for the market, with

We present a theoretical and empirical methodology that reflects the Cryptocurrency version of VIX, which we name it as CVIX (Crypto VIX), and captures the future 30 days forward Crypto risk (fear). Our framework is built on idiosyncratic and systematic Crypto risk, and is not based on the option

Volatility indices, based upon the methodology of the Cboe volatility index (VIX), serve as measures of near-term market uncertainty across asset classes. They are constructed from out-of-the-money put and call premia using variance swap pricing. Volatility indices for fixed income markets are of

Table of contents: What does live algorithmic trading on the Cloud mean? What are the pros and cons of deploying your trading strategies to the Cloud? What is the Cloud Service? What is Cloud used for? What cloud providers are good? What are Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Why should I use AWS? Why

In recent years we’ve seen an increase in the accuracy of NLP models through the use of Transformers. These models rely on the attention mechanism to identify key features but, how do they work? And most importantly, can we somehow use them in finance? Transformers The transformer is a relatively

About a year and a half ago, after one of the worst relative drawdowns the value factor has ever seen, I wrote a piece showing the value factor was cheap relative to history. Since then, value strategies are on a solid run (look at pretty much any type of value strategy and I think you’d agree).

The range over the last week has been very tight. Every SPY close in the 5 days since 11/16 has been within the intraday range of that 11/16/21 bar. It is said that consolidations are often resolved in the direction of the trend. This guideline suggests that we’re more likely to see another leg up

With more than 118 million Americans in or nearing retirement (age 50 or older)[1], income has become a key component for many portfolios. But as asset allocators reach for yield in a low-rate environment, they must be extra mindful of the additional risks they may be accepting. In this blog we

The valuation of the S&P 500 depends on portfolio construction Analyst EPS projections are likely overly optimistic PEG ratios of other stock markets are more attractive INTRODUCTION Striking a bargain seems to bring joy to all people, regardless of their location and their beliefs. It is almost

Although the factors in asset pricing models offer a premium in the long run, they are undergoing bull and bear market cycles in the short term. One would expect that it is due to their connection to the business cycles as the factor premium represents a reward for bearing the macroeconomic risks. A

My last blog post was about a new method for a daily dynamic optimisation of portfolios with limited capital, to allow them to trade large numbers of instruments. (Although I normally write my blog posts to be self contained, you'll definitely have to read the previous one for this to make any

This blog post is the continuation (and finale) of series about Quantconnect’s AlphaMarket strategies. This part is related to the multi-factor strategies notoriously known from the majority of asset classes. We continue in the examination of factor strategies built on top of social trading

The time around Thanksgiving has shown some strong tendencies – both bullish and bearish. I have discussed them a number of times over the years. In the updated table below I show SPX performance results based on the day of the week around Thanksgiving. The bottom row is the Monday of Thanksgiving

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relationship between risk and return. However, empirical studies have found the actual relationship to be basically flat, or even negative. Over the last 50

Most Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies trade just once a month. Backtests of those strategies usually assume trades are executed on the last trading day of the month. Why? Monthly asset data is often available further back into history than daily data. Assuming trades are executed at

Let’s talk about insider trading. In an imaginary world where you know with certainty that the price of a stock will change on a given date – you can place a huge investment for enormous gains. Why wouldn’t you? There is no risk of the trade going bad because you have complete certainty in

Today we will again talk more about the portfolio management theory, and we will focus on techniques for combining quantitative strategies into one multi-strategy portfolio. So, let’s imagine we already have a set of profitable investment strategies, and we need to combine them. The goal of such

Given the importance of inflation as a topic, there are surprisingly few inflation-themed ETFs The few available pursue differentiated strategies that result in heterogeneous portfolios The correlation of these ETFs to inflation has been relatively low INTRODUCTION Creating an investment framework

Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis were the most widely used methods for topic modeling for the past 20 years. However, they rely on heavy pre-processing of the text content (custom stop-word lists, stemming, and lemmatization), and require the number of topics to

Value opportunities arise when market prices deviate from contracts’ present values of all associated entitlements or obligations. However, this theoretical concept is difficult and expensive to apply. Instead, simple valuation ratios, such as real interest rates or equity earnings yields with

Now before we dive into testing a strategy we must first define what makes a good pair to test in the first place. This is a question that has not one answer but several depending on the approach you want to take. We will discuss some of the possibilities and the weapons of choice if you want to

Ben and Cameron, which host the excellent Rational Reminder podcast, sit down with Jack Vogel and go through a laundry list of factor investing questions. The topics discussed: 0:27 Do long-only factor premiums survive transaction costs? 2:28 Would the market impact of rebalancing a fund like MTUM

Nobody would argue that nowadays, we live in an information-rich society – the amount of available information (data) is constantly rising, and news is becoming more accessible and frequent. It is indisputable that this evolvement has also affected financial markets. Machine learning algorithms

In the prior post Tracking Posts on WallStreetBets - Part I, we demonstrated how relatively easy it is to extract reddit activities related to a given stock ticker - in their raw form. If you haven't already read that post, you may want to take a moment to skim that article. In this post, we

In this article, we cluster stock price time series with hierarchical clustering and Euclidean, correlation, and Jensen-Shannon distances to answer two questions regarding portfolio diversification. How diversified is a given portfolio? How can a diversified portfolio be constructed? Procedure For