Once again today the Fed delivered just what the market needed to hear. Although the word “patient” was removed from the official statement, its removal was accompanied by dovish comments that tanked the greenback and just above everything else soared higher. Stocks reversed and moved sharply

My recent research has been in ETFs which I have not explored in several years. ETF sector rotation has always intrigued me. The idea seems so simple that it should work. Always be in the sector that has been doing the best. I like simple but does it work? If not, can we make it … C

In this post we will look at the results for a Momentum Rotation strategy that ranks funds based on the sum of two rate-of-change (ROC) values. We will use the same portfolio of ETFs discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. So far this series has started a number of good conversations, trying

A target price forecast scaled by current price provides the analyst’s assessment of the implied return to that stock over the stated forecast horizon. Using a simple valuation framework, we show that implied returns are a function of the expected dividend distribution, analysts’ private

How should financial education incorporate the experience of the 2007-2009 financial crisis? In their May 2014 publication entitled Investment Management: A Science to Teach or an Art fo Learn?, Frank Fabozzi, Sergio Focardi and Caroline Jonas summarize the current approach to teaching finance

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated ~Mark Twain Wow, it has been a while. Roughly four years have gone by since the my last post. It might seem like a long time for some, but coming out of college and hitting the ground running as a full-time trader made it seem like the blink of an

In the last post, we covered how to evaluate the profitability and risk of your strategy. Now let’s take a look at measuring the Statistical Significance, Stability, and Live Performance of your strategy. Statistical Significance

Tomorrow we may know a little more about the future course of interest rates when the Fed concludes its two-day meeting. They may choose to remain “patient” for additional data or they may be comfortable with what they already have and choose that nearly seven years of zero was enough and the

Is a market trending or not? Even this simple question, which is at the heart of most of our thinking about markets, is not easy to answer. Definitions of trend are often subjective, depend on both timeframe (e.g., daily or intraday) and reference period (i.e., how far are we looking back?), and are

We study whether commonly analyzed equity return predictors also predict corporate bond returns. Bond markets do price risk, but also are susceptible to delayed information transmission relative to equities. Specifically, equity market capitalization and firm profitability negatively predict bond

Where Do Stocks Go From Here? After six years of virtually uninterrupted gains, people are wondering where we go from here. Stocks are up more than 200% over the last six years which is the best six-year run since the tech bubble. Looking at the chart, we see that we are well above the 85%

In today's entry of the Forex Trading Diary I want to discuss the longer term plan for the forex trading system. In addition I want to outline how I've used Python's Decimal data-type to make calculations more accurate. To date, we've been experimenting with the OANDA Rest API in

Recently I have been working on the problem of how to construct large portfolios of cointegrated securities. My focus has been on ETFs rather that stocks, although in principle the methodology applies equally well to either, of course. My preference for ETFs is due primarily to the fact that it is

Saint Patrick’s Day is March’s sole recurring cultural event. Gains the day before Saint Patrick’s Day have proved to be greater than the day itself and the day after. Perhaps it’s the anticipation of the patron saint’s holiday that boosts the market and the distraction from the parade

Existing studies show that firm asset and investment growth predict cross-sectional stock returns. Firms that shrink their assets or investments subsequently earn higher returns than firms that expand their assets or investments. I show that the superior returns of the low asset and investment

In Part 1, I discussed an issue that can occur when using dividend adjusted price data in Momentum Rotation Strategies that select funds based on a relative ranking algorithm. I outlined three different data approaches that can be used, and presented a simple rotation strategy and portfolio to

Global Momentum -- CHINA

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Global Momentum -- JAPAN

Bad junk food tastes great; until the after effects kick in hours later. Similarily, flashy financial analysis will have you happily plunging money into a shiny new scheme, only noticing the stomach churning results afterwards. Let's take a look at some whizzy analysis that financial experts

In the previous post on using R for portfolio analysis and design, we discovered that global diversification across asset classes has been modestly beneficial relative to a basic 60%/40% US stock/bond allocation. The global aspect didn’t add a lot of value because US equities during the sample

Related research paper has been included into existing free strategy review. #33 - Post-Earnings Announcement Effect Authors: Kwon, Kim Title: Investment Horizon of Shareholders and Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2545189 Abstract: We

There is a seasonal influence that could have a bullish impact on the market this week. Op-ex week in general is pretty bullish. March, April, October, and December it has been especially so. S&P 500 options began trading in mid-1983. The table below is one I have showed on the blog in years

Manager Selection (Scott Stewart) Measuring the Size Effect with Capitalization-based ETFs (CXO Advisory) Asymmetric Reporting (Armstrong, Taylor and Verrecchia) The Piotroski F Score in the Australian Market: Performance & Fundamental Drivers (Charles Hyde) How Often Should You Take Tactical

I am going to take a short break from reviewing backtest results for different variations of Iron Condors, and revisit Momentum Rotation strategies. In a past post (Historical Data and Momentum Rotation Strategies), I discussed how data choices impact the repeatability of ranking output typically

Before I detail any sort of “strategy” (and please note that the use of the word “strategy” and the lack of the words “mechanical trading system guaranteed to generate obscene profits ad infinitum into the future”) let me address a few questions that have come up since I wrote this

I have 4 Bitcoin L3 exchange feeds running smoothly out of a data center in California (which is slightly closer to Asian exchanges and Coinbase than the east coast). It took a bit of error handling and exponential back-off, to handle the unreliability of connectivity with these exchanges, where

Another hotly anticipated FOMC meeting kicks off next week, so I thought it would be timely to highlight a less well-known working paper, “Stock Returns over the FOMC Cycle”, by Cieslak, Morse and Vissing-Jorgensen (current draft June 2014). Its main result is: Over the last 20 years, the

More and more frequently I come across people who express an interest in R, and I thought I would share some advice to help people decide if R is something they should use, as well as some high level advice on getting started. Most of these people are developers with at least few years experience

Next week is options expiration week. March is the first time of the year when stock options, index options, index futures, and single-stock/ETF futures all expire at the same time. This event is often referred to as Quadruple Witching or as we prefer to call it in the Stock Trader’s Almanac (page

This study sought to disentangle the effects of size and whether there are size and momentum effects on Jordan firm returns. Initial findings showed that size effect has important role in explaining returns. For momentum effect, while in general there is no momentum effect in Jordan firm market, the

Years flat by the Ides of March $SPY

The images above are the famous Sierpinski Triangle and the Koch Snowflake. These objects are “self-similar” and this means that examination at finer levels of resolution will reveal the same shape. Both are examples of “fractal” geometry, and are characteristic of many phenomena in the

Journal of Econometrics accepts several papers on option pricing, some are quite interesting and represent the recent developments of this field. I list them here just in case you are also interested. Smile from the Past: A general option pricing framework with multiple volatility and leverage

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Skew, our second blog. Until we move it to its permanent home, you can find it at GestaltU.com/skew/. Bookmark it or add it to your feed reader right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Every day, we consume a formidable amount of information. Some of the

Everyone knows about value investing now, and everyone is tilting towards value, so its going to stop working. Everyone is saying this to me lately--sometimes as a question, sometimes as a statement of fact. Yogi Berra famously said, "no one goes to that restaurant anymore, its too

The nation's recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions concerning the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the "real" economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively

You can use the Piotroski F-Score to improve most investment strategies, not just a low price to book strategy as Joseph Piotroski successfully proved in his 2000 research paper "Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers". How to

Do popular capitalization-based exchange-traded funds (ETF) confirm the existence of a reliably exploitable size effect? To investigate, we compare the difference in equally weighted returns (small minus large) for the following matched pair of small-large ETFs: iShares Russell 2000 Index (Smallcap)

Momentum in firm fundamentals, i.e., earnings momentum, explains the performance of strategies based on price momentum. Earnings surprise measures subsume past performance in cross sectional regressions of returns on firm characteristics, and the time-series performance of price momentum strategies

The code in R for Conditional Percentile Channels is now available on Michael Kapler’s Systematic Investor blog. The original code was contributed by long-time reader Pierre Chretien and subsequently verified by Michael. Pierre has been generous enough to share code from the blog material several

A short one this time around. Anyway, many traders are familiar with the effects of seasonality in the stock market. If you would like to know more may I recommend this link? But far fewer traders are aware that bonds have displayed several meaningful and useful seasonal trends. For example…. The

Scott’s Investments provides a free “Dual ETF Momentum” spreadsheet which was originally created in February 2013. The strategy was inspired by a paper written by Gary Antonacci and available on Optimal Momentum. Antonacci has a new book out, Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for

This post will be a quick review of Iron Condor option strategy starting structures. I will begin with the three starting structures that I have used for backtesting on this blog. We will then move on to a few other structures, with some discussion on how these structures can be modified and/or

Related research paper has been included into existing free strategy reviews. #5 - FX Carry Trade #8 - FX Momentum #9 - FX Value – PPP Strategy Authors: Pojarliev, Levich Title: A New Look at Currency Investing Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2571391 Abstract: The authors

March turning points (objective) $SPY

I pushed quantmod 0.4-4 to CRAN this weekend. It adds a getSymbols.yahooj function to pull stock data from Yahoo Finance Japan, and fixes issues in getOptionChain.yahoo and getSymbols.oanda. Changes to the Yahoo Finance and Oanda websites broke the getOptionChain.yahoo and getSymbols.oanda

I have just been trying to import some data into R. The data were exported from a SQL Server client in tab-separated value (TSV) format. However, reading the data into R the "usual" way produced unexpected results: > data <- read.delim("sample-query.tsv", header = FALSE,

In a prior blog post, I wrote about a simple formula that can be utilized to understand the impact that rising rates may have upon a constant maturity fixed-income index. Emanuel Derman wrote a similar post about constant duration indices. While most people are aware of duration and how to use it to

We examine the causal effect of limits-to-arbitrage on ten well-known asset pricing anomalies using Regulation SHO as a natural experiment. We find that asset pricing anomalies become weaker on portfolios constructed with pilot stocks during the pilot period. The effect is both statistically and