ETF Dividend Cycles Pekka Honkanen (University of Georgia), et al. February 2023 Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) collect approximately 7% of all U.S. corporate dividends, which they are required to redistribute to investors. How do the funds manage these dividend flows, and does such management have

AlphaVantage were founded in 2017 following the demise of the Yahoo Finance API. They offer OHLC data on 100,000+ securities, ETFs and mutual funds. Along with Forex, Crypto and Fundamental data, all accessible via their REST API. They offer free or premium membership which depend on the number API

We usually compute return attribution to know how much each asset contributes to portfolio return. This calculation is quite easy because return formula is linear and sub-additive. In that context, one can split the whole portfolio return in smaller parts corresponding to each asset. However,

The turbulence index, introduced in the previous blog post, is a measure of statistical unusualness of asset returns popularized by Kritzman and Li1. It provides a way to measure how much the behavior of a group of assets differs from its historical pattern. In this post, based on the paper Optimal

Fifty years ago, Princeton economics professor Burton Malkiel published A Random Walk Down Wall Street. He boldly asserted that a blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts could pick a stock portfolio that would do as well as one created by many expert practitioners in the field. At the time, Malkiel

Shorting stocks with poor features was unattractive throughout most of the last decade Combining features would not have improved performance It only started working again in 2022 INTRODUCTION Playing the stock market should be easy. When the economy is booming, buy equities. When it’s

This research examines the potential of enhancing a standard momentum strategy using signals derived from Salience Theory (ST). The strategy presented here is to exclude stocks with extreme salience scores and then analyze the risk and return properties of the ST strategy. Salience theory and

The biggest news this week is that Deribit is moving ahead with launching futures on their DVOL Bitcoin volatility index. Like with every new product launch, I am cautiously optimistic, but given that Deribit has ~ 90% market share in cryptocurrency options volume, I think that the product has a

We applied Corrective AI (Chan, 2022) to a trading model that takes advantage of the intraday seasonality of forex returns. Breedon and Ranaldo (2012) observed that foreign currencies depreciate vs. the US dollar during their local working hours and appreciate during the local working hours of the

Traditional value strategies use common valuation metrics, such as book-to-market (B/M), price-to-earnings (P/E), price-to-sales (P/S) or price-to-cash flow (P/CF), to establish a ratio between a market value and a fundamental anchor to assess the cheapness of a stock. The largest historical

This is a test of the latest tactical asset allocation strategy from Dr. Wouter Keller and JW Keuning and their paper: Dual and Canary Momentum with Rising Yields/Inflation: Hybrid Asset Allocation (HAA). Backtested results from 1971 follow. Results are net of transaction costs – see backtest

As those of you who follow me on the Elon Musk Daily News App will know, I received physical copies of my new book last week (exciting!). Global supply chains being what they are, you lot will have to wait until April to get your copies. Sorry. Anyway one of the themes I touch on in the book is the

In this article, the authors examine the research on the benefits of international diversification. Some argue that because equity markets generally crash simultaneously, there are no benefits to having equity diversification. The evidence from this paper rejects this hypothesis. Diversification

In this short blog post, we investigate whether a simple systematic market-neutral stat arb crypto book loads on the main components of a statistical risk model. from datetime import timedelta import pandas as pd from tqdm import tqdm import statsmodels.formula.api as smf def

This research note is a guest post from Rodolfo Martell, PhD, Head of Portfolio Strategy, of Pluribus Labs LLC, a San Francisco-based systematic active equity manager that is part of Exos Financial. SUMMARY Religious-themed ETFs have increased their AUM to roughly $1 billion 3 / 4 products

Financial literature has produced a long list of firm characteristics (referred to as factors) that provide information as to future stock returns, with the explanation for the casual relationship between the characteristics and returns being either risk- or behavioral-based. The traditional finance

The problem of missing financial data is widespread yet often overlooked. An interesting insight into the structure of missing financial data provides a novel research paper by authors Bryzgalova et al. (2022). Firstly, examining the dataset of the 45 most popular characteristics in asset pricing,

Unlike other derivatives markets, for commodity futures, there is a direct relation between economic activity and demand for the underlying assets. Data on industrial production and inventory build-ups indicate whether recent past demand for industrial commodities has been excessive or repressed.

Deutsche Bank Currency Volatility Index was developed to provide an implied volatility benchmark for major currency markets. The index is designed to represent investors’ expectation of future volatility, and is calculated as the weighted arithmetic average of the 3-month level of implied

Much like in 2008, managed futures as an investment strategy had an impressive year in 2022. With most traditional asset classes struggling to navigate the inflationary macroeconomic environment, managed futures has been drawing interest as a potential diversifier. Managed futures is a hedge fund

Over the last few years, a number of new market data providers have come online. They tend to have modern websites, broad coverage, and well-documented RESTful APIs. Their services are often priced very competitively – especially for personal use – and usually have generous free tiers. One such

Short-biased hedge funds provided negative S&P 500 beta until 2011 Thereafter returns became less negatively correlated, but worsened The strategy has generated limited diversification benefits for investors INTRODUCTION Running a hedge fund is tough, but some types are tougher to manage than

Bayesian statistics is a powerful field of mathematics that has wide-ranging applications in many fields, including finance, medical research, and information technology. It allows us to combine prior beliefs with evidence to obtain new posterior beliefs, thereby enabling us to make more informed

HAA aims to offer retail investors a tactical asset allocation strategy that is both balanced and aggressive at the same time. HAA’s hybrid approach combines traditional dual momentum with canary momentum which results in robust crash protection with low cash-fractions. HAA effectively selects

Suppose, in a national TV newscast, instead of citing data, analysis and predictions from major government agencies, the weatherperson displayed a chart of recent temperatures, noting “trends,” “waves” and “breakout patterns.” Most of us would not have confidence in such a dubious and

As seen in the table below, the four-year period November 2016-October 2020 could be described as a “dark winter” for value stocks. U.S. value stocks underperformed U.S. growth stocks by 16.81 percentage points per annum (20.35% vs. 3.54%), the largest historical drawdown for value stocks in the

Submergence = Drawdown Plus Recovery Dane Rook (Stanford University), et al. February 2023 Drawdowns and recoveries are often analyzed separately – yet doing so can leave investors with a distorted view of risk. Indeed, this problem is so commonplace that there’s no consistently-used term for

Cryptocurrencies are a high-risk and very speculative asset class that, from being used only by tech geeks worldwide, spread from small retail craziness of early adopters to institutional adoption and mainstream. Some claim it to be a world-changing concept with the utilization of blockchain

The financial industry is constantly searching for models that can help accurately predict the behavior of interest rates. In this article we will explore one of the most widely used models for this purpose, the Nelson-Siegel (NS) model. What is the Nelson-Siegel Model? The NS model is a yield curve

The S&P 500 has meaningful exposure to international markets Measuring geographical exposure can be done top-down or bottom-up However, both approaches have flaws INTRODUCTION Globalization has significantly improved our lives, although some countries like Germany have benefitted more than

Attention all traders! Are you looking for a cutting-edge way to dominate the markets and maximize your profits? Look no further than the power of ChatGPT and TradingView. By combining the advanced AI capabilities of ChatGPT with the unparalleled charting and analysis tools of TradingView, you can

In his TASC February 2023 article, John Ehlers proposed to use the average of open and close, rather than the close price, for technical indicators. The advantage is a certain amount of noise reduction. On intraday bars the open-close average is similar to an SMA(2). It makes the data a bit

The recorded history of modern financial markets and macroeconomic developments is limited. Hence, statistical analysis of macro trading factors often relies on panels, sets of time series across different currency areas. However, country experiences are not independent and subject to common

The US dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, is the most widely traded currency in the world (making up over 85% of all foreign exchange transactions), and is used as the benchmark currency for pricing many commodities such as oil and gold. We can say that the US dollar is the blood of

As Cliff Asness demonstrated in his 2012 paper “An Old Friend: The Stock Market’s Shiller P/E,” valuations provide quite a bit of important information for investors. What do valuation spreads tell us about future expected returns? Higher starting values mean that not only are future expected

Lots of things have changed in the last year. Many unthinkable things are now thinkable. A war in Europe. The UK coming 2nd in the Eurovision song contest rather than the usual dismal 'null points'. And of course, the correlation of stocks and bonds has recently gone more positive than it

Growth ETFs are not very differentiated, despite growth having various interpretations 34 out of 40 growth ETFs underperformed the stock market over the last 3 years Nor was the long-term performance attractive INTRODUCTION Factors like value or momentum are also called stock market anomalies as

In a lot of my work, including my new book, I use two different ways of measuring standard deviation. The first method, which most people are familiar with, is to use some series of recent percentage returns. Given a series of prices p_t you might imagine the calculation would be something like

Many investors, especially those using a cash flow approach to spending, have long known that they prefer cash dividends. From the perspective of classical financial theory, this behavior is an anomaly. In their 1961 paper, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Merton Miller

As readers of my books will know, I don't recommend leveraged ETFs as a way to get leverage. Their ways are very dark and mysterious. But like many dark and mysterious things, they are also kind of funky and cool. In this post I will explore their general funkiness, and I will also show you how

SPX will post a Golden Cross on Thursday afternoon. A Golden Cross occurs when the 50ma crosses over the 200ma. Having the 50ma above the 200ma is commonly considered a bullish market condition – and generally it is. In the 7/9/20 blog post I looked at SPX Golden Crosses dating all the way back to

I run some experiments on the impact of covariance matrix construction on portfolio stability. In particular, the following ways to generate a covariance matrix will be attempted: Sample covariance — the most basic approach to construct a simple covariance matrix based on historical return data

The theme of rebalancing in longer-term investing is neglected but important as it influences the overall portfolio’s performance and risk. Unfortunately, many investors are inconsistent in choosing dates for their rebalances of portfolios, resulting in hardly predictable results (whether

This is the second post in a series I'm doing about whether I can trade faster strategies than I currently do, without being destroyed by high trading costs. The series is motivated in the first post, here. In this post, I see if it's possible to 'smuggle in' high cost trading

Generally, a quant is a professional in the financial technology industry who designs complex algorithms with the help of quantitative analysis. Quants are skilled in mathematics, finance, and computer skills. In the trading domain, quants design and implement algorithms to predict the price and

Using monthly versus daily returns when calculating correlations can change the perspective Foreign stock markets and US bond markets were highly correlated to US stocks using monthly returns Diversification benefits may have been significantly overstated using daily returns INTRODUCTION Investing

A new paper, Causal factor investing: Can factor investing become scientific?, has been written by our esteemed colleague Marcos Lopez de Prado of Cornell University, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and True Positive Technologies. In his 75-page preprint, Lopez de Prado argues that almost all journal

Using portfolio theory, the authors of this piece develop an approach for estimating the degree of political risk between a country and its export destination and the status of political relationships. The research about political beta presented is the first to apply portfolio theory to problems

A couple of new and interesting developments concerning the Global Growth Cycle strategy are available: - first of all, what I've called an important test of the strategy from 2021/22 apparently went well. The ensuing bear market of 2022 has been largely avoided by positioning per the GGC. The

An extract from my new book, Equity Analytics.