Gregory Zuckerman, author of The Greatest Trade Ever, has published a new book highlighting the life and work of Jim Simons, who, at the age of 40, walked away from a very successful career as a research mathematician and cryptologist to try his hand at the financial markets, and ultimately

Academic literature recognizes a large set of indicators or factors that are connected with the various assets. These indicators can be utilized in a variety of trading strategies, which means that such indicators are popular among practitioners who seek to invest their funds. Usually, the

When working with time series financial data, stationarity (or lack thereof!) is going to be a defining aspect of how you conduct your analyses. In this article, we're going to give you a quick refresher of what these terms mean and how they affect your data. Let's start with importing the

As readers would know, discussing ways to combine quant and fundamental investing has been a topic I care about (see some prior posts here, here and here). Perhaps I’m biased. But I believe that proper collaboration between quant and fundamental approaches is still a largely unexplored area. Yes,

There are various Python projects which require sorting but not the ones that employ a default alphanumeric functionality. We talk about manually specified order or human-order, in short. One of such examples is the case study presented below. Imagine that your risk system provides you with a list

Since the global financial crisis, the financial press has periodically asserted that the Federal Reserve’s actions were the driving force behind rising stock prices. This study investigates this assertion by asking the following research question: Is there a relationship between stock prices and

ESG ETFs underperformed the stock market since 2005 Likely explained by higher fees, a constrained stock universe, and sector bets Financially-impaired investors like public pension funds and Millennials should avoid ESG investing INTRODUCTION If investors would be looking for the ETF flavor of the

This post will detail a rather important finding I found while implementing a generalized framework for momentum asset allocation backtests. Namely, that when computing momentum (and other financial measures for use in asset allocation, such as volatility and correlations), measuring formal months,

Chart analysis is all about visualizing data. The RSI hellfire indicator uses a heat-map to visualizes how overbought or oversold the market is on a broad scale. This helps to get a broad picture of the current market setup. Multiple Time-frame Relative Strength Index Wells Wilder’s RSI is an old

You may have noticed that this blog has been mostly inactive in 2019. Earlier this year, I took a full-time position with one of my buy-side consulting clients focused on researching methodologies for application of ML / data science to alpha research. While I'm thoroughly enjoying the work, it

The automated trading system or Algorithmic Trading has been at the centre-stage of the trading world for more than a decade now. A “trading system”, more commonly referred as a “trading strategy” is nothing but a set of rules, which is applied to the given input data to generate entry and

This is a collection of Jupyter notebooks based on different topics in the area of quantitative finance. Is this a tutorial? Almost! 🙂 This is just a collection of topics and algorithms that in my opinion are interesting. It contains several topics that are not so popular nowadays, but that can be

Thanksgiving has some seasonal tendencies, with Wednesday and Friday often being bullish, and the Monday after being bearish. This year not only did Wednesday perform well, but it left the SPX at a new high heading into the holiday. So I decided to look back at other times SPX closed at a 50-day

Sometimes an online option calculator isn’t enough and you’d like to implement the Black & Scholes (B&S) option pricing equations in Excel. If you’re just playing around it doesn’t matter how you structure the calculation. In fact, for clarity’s sake, it’s probably a good idea to

The standard academic approach to factor analysis is through the lens of long-short portfolios (which often confuses practitioners!). For example, a researcher may take the universe of the largest 1,000 stocks and sort them on “value”, as measured via book-to-market. The “value factor”

One of the challenges with technical or quantitative analysis is to identify strategies that can adapt to different market regimes. The most obvious is a change in the forecast or implied volatility as proxied by the VIX. During more volatile periods we would expect more signal noise and during less

The use of valuation multiples in selecting equity securities is well established in the literature, and we’ve covered the research on enterprise multiples here (here is a recent JPM on the topic). However, there are relevant questions as to the effectiveness of multiples when applied to national

There is a substantial body of evidence linking various accounting ratios to expected stock returns. One explanation of the links is that they could be explained by the accounting ratios being associated with systematic sources of risk. Alternatively, they could be associated with mispricing that

It happens very often that we work because we don’t see any alternatives. Our job may be annoying as hell, we may even hate it, but the reality seems like we don’t have any other options. We have a mortgage, we have a family to maintain, or our qualifications aren’t allowing us to do something

Shareholder activism has not grown from a campaign or AUM perspective recently Activist funds have not generated attractive returns The lack of outperformance is challenging to explain INTRODUCTION Active fund managers today are like deer caught in the headlights of oncoming traffic as the

In this project, we analyze different intraday trading strategies with Pivot Points. After defining different ways of calculating the Pivot Point, we do a Backtest with the most classic strategies and a different variant to those normally taught in textbooks. To learn about Pivot Point and how to

ETF Momentum Frank Weikai Li (Singapore Management University), et al. October 12, 2019 We document economically large momentum profits when sorting ETFs on returns over the past two to four years. A value-weighted, long-short strategy based on ETF momentum delivers Carhart (1997) four-factor alphas

Popular factors for government bond investment are “carry”, “momentum”, “value” and “defensive”. “Carry” depends on the steepness of the yield curve, which to some extent reflects aversion to risk and volatility. “Momentum” relates to medium-term directional trends, which in

Recently I was invited to talk with Stig and Preston on The Investor’s Podcast. I thank them for the opportunity and enjoyed the conversation! Below are some of the topics we discussed: What is factor investing? Which factors have historically performed the best? Should one use a single factor or

In this post, I share my vision for an Open Trading standard for communicating with online brokers using modern technologies. While looking for a way to add support for multiple brokers and data vendors to my open source Python trading library, I discovered that there's currently no way to

Over the past decade academics and practitioners alike have argued that multi-factor portfolios offer significant benefits to investors looking for enhanced and more diversified solutions. Among the papers making this argument is “The Death of Diversification is Greatly Exaggerated”, co-authored

Guest: Andreas Clenow is the Chief Investment Officer of ACIES Asset Management AG. He manages alternative investment funds for institutional and qualified investors. He has served as Nordic Manager for the Analytics Consulting division of Reuters Consulting, covering Sweden, Norway, Denmark,

Systematic trading is often synonymous with short-term trading frequencies in the retail quant trading space. Daily and intraday strategies tend to receive the bulk of the community's attention. The popularity of systematic cryptocurrency trading has put a further emphasis on short term trading

One compelling study that triggered Tuesday in the Quantifinder suggested the recent persistent upmove is unlikely to abruptly end. (This is a theme we have seen many times over the years.) It considers what happens after the market moves up at least 5 days in a row to a 50-day high, and then pulls

Concept: Opening Range Breakout (ORB) with Volatility Clustering (Large price moves tend to be followed by large price moves, and small price moves tend to be followed by small price moves). Research Question: Can we improve performance of the original volatility clustering model via Opening Range

In past research notes we have explored the impact of rebalance timing luck on strategic and tactical portfolios, even using our own Systematic Value methodology as a case study. In this note, we generate empirical timing luck estimates for a variety of specifications for simplified value, momentum,

AI & Data Science in Trading brings together experts in the use of AI and advanced data analytic techniques within asset management, primarily for finding alpha, managing risk and optimizing portfolios. Now in its fifth edition, rotating between the global financial hubs of NYC and London, this

Divergent thinking is what we learn in school when we are paying attention. It allows us to solve hard problems with one right answer. Convergent thinking is what happens when we stop paying attention and start doodling. Convergent thinking produces many answers, none of which are technically

In the market, it is crucial to spot the trend, but it is equally important to detect when the trend ends. Getting out of the trade is more difficult than entering the trade. In this blog, we will talk about one such technical indicator, the Parabolic SAR indicator, which helps in identifying when

Bond indices are frequently portrayed as featuring a lower quality composition than equity indices Analysing equity and bond indices in the US and emerging markets confirms this view Perhaps this explains why there is some alpha generation in fixed income INTRODUCTION While almost all fund managers

Inspired by recent headlines like Fear Overtakes Greed in IPO Market after WeWork Debacle and This Year’s IPO Class is Least Profitable since the Tech Bubble, today we’ll explore historical IPO data and next time we’ll look at the the performance of IPO driven-portfolios constructed during the

Endogenous risk arises from the interaction of financial market participants, as opposed to traded assets’ fundamental value. It often manifests as feedback loops after some exogenous shock. An important type of endogenous market risk is setback risk, which refers to the asymmetry of the upside

A negative October takes the State of Trend Following index in the red for the year. Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: October return: -3.92% YTD return: -3.23% Below is the chart displaying individual system results throughout October: StateTF

Gregory Zuckerman is a writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution. For anyone unfamiliar, Jim Simons is the brilliant-minded mathematician who founded hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Using quantitative models and

Whenever you develop an algorithmic trading strategy, curve fitting is one of the most dangerous hazards. It will lead to severe losses in real time trading. This article will show you some ways to detect if the performance of your algorithmic trading strategy is based on curve fitting. Curve

It is well documented in the literature that over the long term, low-investment firms have outperformed high-investment firms.(1) This finding has led to the investment factor (CMA, or conservative minus aggressive) being incorporated into the leading asset pricing models—the four-factor Q model

At QuantStart we place an emphasis on fully automated systematic trading and the processes that surround it. However we should be careful to distinguish between the separate concepts of systemisation and automation. The former involves a trading strategy that can be codified into a set of rules,

In Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) or Dual Momentum (DM) strategies, they often will use trend-following or momentum to decide whether to invest in asset or not. I have two questions. One, how often does either trend-following or momentum they beat buy and hold? Two, of the two which one beats the

A new DFA article by Rizova and Saito (2019, “Investment and Expected Stock Returns”) (1) rehashes previous arguments in Fama and French (2006, 2015) on the investment factor. The core arguments are as follows: Valuation theory predicts that expected investment is negatively correlated with

In my last post, I stated my intention to write a series of posts about skew. Slight change of plan, since one loyal reader suggested that I write about kurtosis. I thought that might be fun, since I haven't thought about kurtosis much, and the literature on kurtosis isn't as well

When it comes to the world’s most secretive hedge fund any content is worthwhile to read. I finished the book is 3 days and had to re-read a couple more chapters to ensure I fully absorbed the couple nuggets in there. I would recommend this book to everyone! The mystery behind how Simons

For readers interested in getting signals and analytics on hundreds of ETFs and individual stocks our Investor IQ website is currently live and free during our beta-testing phase. We will be adding new data and analytics gradually over time as well as improving website functionality. The Economic

Recent studies of startup activity in the U.S. find that only roughly 10–15% of startups are founded by women. There are a number of potential explanations including gender differences in technical training or risk preferences. However, many have also speculated that part of the gender gap may, in

We have shown previously that it is possible to time factors using value and momentum but that the benefit is not large. By constructing a simple model for factor timing, we examine what accuracy would be required to do better than a momentum-based timing strategy. While the accuracy required is not