When we tell our investors to invest for the long run, we have to make sure the short run doesn’t kill them first… Investing for the long run isn’t bad advice, it’s just unrealistic. It doesn’t take into account human behavior. -Andrew Lo (HT: Andrew Thrasher) Trend following has

What are the research questions? Financial theory asserts a clear link between the risk-free interest rate and the pricing of equity securities, regardless of the time horizon. Therefore, the market’s opinion about the uncertainty of rates should improve models forecasting equity volatility in the

Bond timing has been difficult for the past 35 years as interest rates have declined, especially since bonds started the period with high coupons. With low current rates and higher durations, the stage may be set for systematic, factor-based bond investing. Strategies such as value, momentum, and

Factor timing and factor risk management are related concepts, but have different objectives Factors have unique characteristics that require a tailored risk management approach A multi-dimensional factor risk management model shows consistent increases in risk-return ratios and decreases in maximum

Is bitcoin a bubble? I don’t know. What defines a bubble? The price should drastically overestimate the underlying fundamentals. I simply don’t know much about blockchain to have an opinion there. A related characteristic is a run-away price. Going up fast just because it is going up fast. How

In this article, I am going to explore an alternative forecasting technique that currently has merits in the field of dam displacement, a structural engineering problem. I will then apply this technique and measure its forecasting capability on the S&P/TSX Composite Index (GSPTSE). The model is

Does the increase in number of Bitcoin wallets at a rate that far exceeds growth in number of Bitcoins explain the dramatic rise in Bitcoin price? In the December revision of his paper entitled “Metcalfe’s Law as a Model for Bitcoin’s Value”, Timothy Peterson models Bitcoin price according

XIV is an inverse-VIX ETN. In other words, it was designed to generally trade inversely to VIX futures on a daily basis. Since VIX and SPX typically trade opposite each other, you would think that XIV and SPX would often close in the same direction. And you would be right. Of course, XIV depends on

Merger arbitrage, sometimes known as “risk arbitrage,” is an investing strategy in which the investor bets on announced M&A deals. After a merger is announced, shares of the target tend to trade below the offered price (due to deal uncertainty), representing the arbitrage spread; if the deal

This post will be about comparing a volatility signal using three different variations of implied volatility indices to predict when to enter a short volatility position. In volatility trading, there are three separate implied volatility indices that have a somewhat long history for trading–the

There is a large literature that reports time-specific anomalies in equity markets such as the Monday effect, the January effect and the Halloween effect. This study is the first to report intra-day time-of-day, day-of-week, and month-of-year effects for Bitcoin returns and trading volume. Using

Imagine the following. You spent time developing a strategy with a compounded annual return of 24% and max drawdown of 18%. Profitable 10 of the last 11 years. An average 21 day rolling correlation with the SPY of .20. Passes your out-of-sample testing. Passes your parameter sensitivity testing.

Machine Learning is one of the most popular approaches in Artificial Intelligence. Over the past decade, Machine Learning has become one of the integral parts of our life. It is implemented in a task as simple as recognizing human handwriting or as complex as self-driving cars. It is also expected

Rankings are everywhere. They are sometimes useful and, at other times, contradicting. In such a case, we need to come up with a consensus ranking but… how do we evaluate ranking consensus? The other day I was reading about something called rank aggregation, which is just a fancy name for

This is the third in a multi-part series in which we explore and compare various deep learning tools and techniques for market forecasting using Keras and TensorFlow. In Part 1, we introduced Keras and discussed some of the major obstacles to using deep learning techniques in trading systems,

Many individual investors employ mutual funds as an alternative to direct ownership of stocks or bonds. Indeed, mutual funds have some advantages: Diversity: Even a single fund can encapsulate a large sector of the market. Peace of mind: One is less likely to stress out about sudden bad news

The start to 2018 has been fairly remarkable. The SPX has only closed down 3 days so far, while closing up 11 days. That is a substantial hot streak, and one might think that such a strong run to start the year would almost certainly have to pullback soon. So I checked. 2018-01-23 The imminent

When two managers implement identical strategies, but merely choose to rebalance on different days, we call variance between their returns “timing luck.” Timing luck can easily be overcome by using a method of overlapping portfolios, but few firms do this in practice. We believe the magnitude of

Is it possible to predict where the Gold price is headed? Yes, let’s use machine learning regression techniques to predict the price of one of the most important precious metal, the Gold. We will create a machine learning linear regression model that takes information from the past Gold ETF (GLD)

Jerome Powell is expected to take over for Janet Yellen as the new Fed chairman on Feb 3rd. A few days ago in the letter I looked at SPX performance after a new chairman takes over. I used the SPX and looked back to 1970. Tonight I decided to take the analysis back to 1923 using my Dow data. Like

Over the last ten years, a number of congress members have been elected on a fairly nihilistic platform, voting against practically any spending bill (unless it buys tanks). This is a good way to get elected but it makes it hard to govern. The government has to spend money. While the Republicans

This notebook will walkthrough the algorithm implementation process on the quantconnect platform. Please be advised that this notebook will not actually run the algorithm as I have not installed the quantconnect backtesting engine locally. This is a demonstration of the process. The script is

Wes asked that I contribute to the ongoing debates regarding the construction of value and momentum portfolios. There are three key research pieces on the topic, all with different viewpoints: Alpha Architect’s take AQR’s take Newfound Research’s Take I encourage everyone to dig into the three

Writing this, I can’t believe how quickly the year 2017 has gone by. Also weird, we are already three weeks into 2018, unreal. Time flies when you’re having fun I guess. The analytics report shows that the three most popular posts for 2017 are: – Understanding False Discovery Rate (4 minutes

Fama-French Factors and Business Cycles Arnav Sheth and Tee Lim (Saint Mary’s College of California) December 4, 2017 We examine the behavior of Fama-French factors across business cycles measured in various ways. We first split up the business cycles into four stages and examine the cumulative

This is the beginning of a three part series that I completed towards the end of 2017 as a learning module for Quantinsti.com. The purpose of the series is to demonstrate a research workflow focused around the theory and application of mixture models as the core framework behind a algorithmic

J.P. Morgan researchers, Marko Kolanovic and Zhen Wei, produced an incredibly detailed report on all aspects of momentum (one of our favorite topics!) Here is a link to the report 188 pages of pure effort and information. Here is a summary of what is examined in the research: As the virtually

This paper proposes a risk-based explanation of the momentum anomaly on equity markets. Regressing the momentum strategy return on the return of a self-financing portfolio going long (short) in stocks with high (low) crash sensitivity in the USA from 1963 to 2012 reduces the momentum effect from a

Wednesday saw both SPX and VIX close at 40-day highs (about 2 months). Since they commonly trade opposite each other, to have them both be extended up like this is very rare. In fact, it has only happened 4 other times. Below is a list of those instances along with their 4-day results. 2018-01-18

This is the beginning of a three part series that I completed towards the end of 2017 as a learning module for Quantinsti.com. The purpose of the series is to demonstrate a research workflow focused around the theory and application of mixture models as the core framework behind a algorithmic

A covered call is used by an investor to make some small profit while holding the stock. Mostly the reason why a trader would want to create a covered call is because the trader is bullish on the underlying stock and wants to hold for long-term, but the stock doesn’t pay any dividend.The stock is

The relationship between series can be measured by different methods. The most common is to check if both series move in the same way. We’d like to go further, and see if the difference between them is always the same. We call it cointegration. In many cases, we are interested in expressing one

This is the beginning of a three part series that I completed towards the end of 2017 as a learning module for Quantinsti.com. The purpose of the series is to demonstrate a research workflow focused around the theory and application of mixture models as the core framework behind a algorithmic

What are the research questions? According to Datamonitor (2010), the influence of peer-based advice, such as user-generated ratings on Amazon.com or Yelp.com, is increasing while traditional advice (e.g., from Consumer Reports or the Michelin guide) is decreasing. This trend is starting to emerge

Factor investing seeks to balance specificity with generality: specific enough to have meaning, but general enough to be applied broadly. Diversification is a key tool to managing risk in factor portfolios. Imprecision in the factor definitions means that unintended bets are necessarily introduced.

Opex week in January is one that the market has seen some struggles over the last 19 years. Below is the list of January op-ex weeks from 1999 – 2017 with their full week performance results. There have been 8 years in which January op-ex week occurred in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day.

Long-short multi-factor portfolios generate attractive returns before fees Returns are much less attractive post fees charged historically However, some fees in the long-short space are likely justified given higher complexity INTRODUCTION Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of

This post will demonstrate how to replicate the volatility ETNs (XIV, VXX, ZIV, VXZ) from CBOE futures, thereby allowing any individual to create synthetic ETF returns from before their inception, free of cost. So, before I get to the actual algorithm, it depends on an update to the term structure

In the last post, we covered Pairs trading strategy and demonstrated how to leverage data and mathematical analysis to create and automate a trading strategy. Long-Short Equity Strategy is a natural extension of Pairs Trading applied to a basket of stocks. Download Ipython Notebook here. Underlying

One compelling study from last night’s 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 back. I

This blog post is a revised edition of Tom’s original blog post with a newer data set. More information, source code & inspiration can be found here. Code for this blog post is in our Github repository. Options are complex instruments with many moving parts. Specifically, options are contracts

A mean reversion strategy I trade was developed with another researcher. This strategy enters on a further intraday weakness with a limit order and typically exits a few days later when the stock bounces. Recently this researcher sent me and email saying “Try the strategy as a day trade. Enter at

Our site serves a lot of purposes for tactical asset allocation (TAA) investors: curating the best published strategies, testing those strategies with superior historical data, providing the ability to combine strategies into custom portfolios, and tracking even the most complex strategies in near

Imagine you’re looking for variables that predict the cross-section of expected returns. No search process is perfect. So, as you work, you will inevitably uncover both tradable anomalies as well as spurious correlations. To figure out which are which, you regress returns on each variables that

On the back of our recent event in New York, we are bringing the big data & machine learning revolution to London this April 24th. Register to receive updates on the agenda! Register Now The London Revolution More than 750 finance professionals registered to attend the New York Revolution but we

The tenth annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held June 1 and 2, 2018 in Chicago, IL, USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing,

It has been well-documented that value stocks have provided higher expected returns than growth stocks. However, there is a great debate about the source of that premium: Is it risk-based or is it related to behavioral errors that create persistent mispricings? There are many papers presenting

Near-perfect neutral month for the State of Trend Following index to close the year just in negative double-digit territory. 2017 was not the best year for the strategy. Let’s see what 2018 has in store. Happy new year to all readers and best wishes for profitable trading. Please check below for

What are the research questions? Is the rate of turnover for outside directors unusually high either before fraud is discovered by the firm, or during its commission? Are there regularities in the characteristics of outside directors who depart during the period in which the financial fraud is

We believe that capital efficiency should remain a paramount objective for investors. The prudent use of leverage can help investors employ more risk efficient portfolios without necessarily sacrificing potential returns. Many investors, however, do not have access to leverage (be it via borrowing