Asset return volatility is typically calculated as (annualized) standard deviation of returns over a sequence of periods, usually daily from close to close. However, this is neither the only nor necessarily the best method. For exchange-traded contracts, such as equity indices, one can use open,

When someone mentions a financial crisis, most people immediately think of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. Even though this is the most significant economic crisis in recent years, there have been many more significant crisis periods in the past 100 years. This article examines the biggest

Since the 1992 publication of “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns” by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French factor-based strategies and products have become an integral part of the global asset management landscape. While “top-down” allocation to factor premiums (such as size, value,

Inflation as the Source of the Bond, Equity, and Value Premia Martin Tarlie (GMO) May 2022 A no-arbitrage pricing model with inflation as the only priced risk factor explains the bond, equity, and value premia observed in the United States over the past sixty years. Even though inflation is the only

Value trading strategies have come back into spotlight in recent years. After lackluster performance in years 2018, 2019, 2020, Value has staged a strong comeback in 2021 and also in 2022. With a long history of systematic equity Value strategies, many different variants of the strategy have

Market commentators sometimes suggest that the equity ETF market is just a bunch of “index funds” that all do essentially the same thing: deliver undifferentiated stock market exposure. How true is that statement? Fortunately, we can test the hypothesis that the ETF market is roughly a few

In a previous post, I introduced near efficient portfolios, which are portfolios equivalent to mean-variance efficient portfolios in terms of risk-return but more diversified in terms of asset weights. Such near efficient portfolios might be used to moderate the tendency of efficient portfolios to

About half of Robeco’s Quantitative Investing team recently published a short paper on monthly trading strategies (see Blitz et everybody Beyond Fama-French Factors: Alpha from Short-Term Signals Frequencies). I can imagine these guys talking about this stuff all the time, and someone finally

Traditional asset pricing theory holds that the workings of information networks among investors are good descriptors of equity markets. Investors that are “better informed” about fundamentals and who trade earlier than less well informed investors will receive higher returns. As the” better

Factor exposure analysis can be used in fixed income as easily as in equities More variables improve the explanatory power of the model However, it also can make the interpretation challenging INTRODUCTION Running a factor exposure analysis is a core element of the due diligence process for

Momentum, the tendency of past winner stocks to outperform past loser stocks over the next several months, is one of the most well-documented and well-researched asset pricing anomalies. In the asset pricing literature, momentum is generally defined over the short-, medium- and long-term in the

In this article we will be introducting Tiingo, a data and stock market tools provider. Founded in 2014 Tiingo aims to empower its users by providing good, clean and more accurate data. They offer OHLCV data for 82,468 Global Securities, 37,319 US & Chinese Stocks 45,149 ETFs & Mutual Funds.

Not long ago, GameStop stock rose like crazy in only a few hours with the effects of broker-dealer options hedging spurred by retail investor buying pressure. And from February to March 2020, options trading activity was also pointed to as a contributor to stock swings in the Covid-19 selloff. The

This is a test of a tactical strategy from the paper Trending Fast and Slow. It trades the S&P 500 by switching between fast and slow momentum based on market volatility. The strategy would have kept pace with the S&P 500, while significantly reducing the worst drawdowns. Backtested results

Some sources of financial data can be expensive or difficult to find. For example, some is only available from exchanges or vendors who charge a hefty fee for access. However, the financial industry is also heavily regulated, and one of its main regulators provides free access to its data. The (U.S.

The Monte Carlo method (Monte Carlo simulations) is a class of algorithms that rely on a repeated random sampling to obtain various scenario results. Monte Carlo simulations are used to predict the probability of different outcomes when it would be difficult to use other approaches such as

Duration volatility risk premium means compensation for bearing return volatility risk of an interest rate swap (IRS) contract. It is the scaled difference between swaption-implied and realized volatility of swap rates’ changes. Historically, these premia have been stationary around positive

Most technological change today is an evolution rather than a revolution. Naturally, it is great to have a mobile device that allows instant access to the global knowledge depository, entertainment, shopping, and so on, but most of these innovations have been predicted decades ago by science fiction

Trend-following strategies have gained extreme popularity in the recent decade. Almost every asset manager utilizes trend following, or momentum, in some form – whether consciously or subconsciously. We at Quantpedia are convinced that each and every strategy has to be scrutinized thoroughly

Investors care about more than just returns. They also care about risk. Thus, prudent investors include consideration of strategies that can provide at least some protection against adverse events that lead to left tail risk (portfolios crashing). The cost of that protection (the impact on expected

Finding a high-quality data source is crucial for quantitative trading strategies. Also, having a long history is beneficial. Fama & French, for example, offer free historical data for stocks and a variety of factors. However, it is very hard to get good-quality and free data for other asset

Clustering algorithms are one of the main techniques in the field of unsupervised learning. In the machine learning context, we understand by unsupervised learning the process of analyzing and identifying patterns in unlabeled datasets. Unsupervised learning algorithms observe similarities and

Value strategies attempting at determining a fair value of an asset are one of the first-ever employed strategies in the markets. We all know about Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet that are one of the best known examples of Value pioneers. Since then, however, Value strategies have evolved

Risk parity strategies have become available via mutual funds and ETFs, but portfolio construction varies Rising interest rates are seen as a threat and recent performance was disappointing However, rising correlations between stocks and bonds would be more concerning INTRODUCTION Risk parity has

n my past life as a rower, I spent a lot of time figuring out which way the wind was blowing: Would it be a headwind and slow things down? Or would it be a tailwind and shorten the race? But a tailwind that went against the current could cause choppy water…which would slow things back down.

Momentum, the tendency of past winner stocks to outperform past loser stocks over the next several months, is one of the most well-documented and well-researched asset pricing anomalies. In our book “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,” Andrew Berkin and I presented the evidence of a

When dealing with factors information is important to go to the detail and get insight about how the factor is built. Ratios combination improves robustness. When we read papers or studies about the Factor Premium of different factors we almost always come across with the problem of how to define

The Nobel price laureate physicist Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” This quote captures the reality in the markets rather accurately. Is Bitcoin breaking through the 50k mark this year? Or even the 100k mark? Will Ethereum outperform

Finding a good data source with quality data and long history is one of the greatest challenges in quantitative trading. There definitely are some data sources with very long histories. However, they tend to be on the more expensive side. On the other hand, cheap or free data usually lacks quality

Given the current rise in inflation, there has been a lot more interest in assets that do well during these times. Gold is one asset that is frequently brought up as an inflation hedge. I have also seen more lately about combining these two into a portfolio. Testing Notes The test range is from 1970

Academic research suggests that high and rising consumer price inflation puts upward pressure on real discount rates and is a headwind for equity market performance. A fresh analysis of 17 international markets since 2000 confirms an ongoing pervasive negative relation between published CPI dynamics

This blog is a follow-up on a first naive modelling of Matalan notes using Bayesian nets. Bayesian nets are a good tool to quantify qualitative knowledge, as explained here. The work presented in this blog post was mostly realized by Zhiyuan Shen in the context of his financial mathematics master of

Plenty of research ( most recently, Cziraki et al. 2021) shows that insider buys contain value-relevant information while insider sales include little to no information. But what about the action of “not trading”? The authors of this study ask the following: Are the trades of portfolio insiders

This is a follow up to our previous post. Same subject, additional data. Both stocks and government bond funds have suffered major losses this year. Stocks and gov bonds form the core of most portfolios. Gov bonds tend to counterbalance risk assets, helping to smooth returns during periods of market

Short answer up front–very little.(1) This was a simple question posed to me by one of our blog readers–what impact does excluding stocks trading at 10x P/S have on a Momentum portfolio? A good question–especially for those who are “value” investors that are interested in momentum. For

Outperforming the market, before expenses, is a zero-sum game—if one group of active investors outperforms, another group of active investors must underperform. Is there a group of sophisticated investors who persistently exploit more naïve investors? The body of research has found that before

I am sometimes asked if I recommend any stock market data (web) API for a personal use, especially because I mention Alpha Vantage in a couple of previous posts1. I will describe in this post part of the thought process and of the due diligence which led me to select this financial market data

Another brief post this month; the deadline for the first draft of my latest book is only a couple of months away and I haven't got much free time! But I was asked an excellent question on twitter recently, which was how the various types of trading rule have contributed to my p&l this

The Internet is full of articles covering all kinds of aspects related to finance. Stocks, crypto, indexes have always been a hot topic and many are seeking new ideas in these areas. It is true that in a vast amount of the content one may get lost. There are tons of blogs with irrelevant, outdated,

Value and momentum are two of the most powerful explanatory factors in finance. Research on both has been published for over 30 years(1). However, it was not until recently that the two had been studied in combination and across markets. Bijon Pani and Frank Fabozzi contribute to the literature with

Graph Theory is widely used in almost every area of interest for visualization or analysis purposes but, for some reason, it is not usually applied in finance. Why not trying to take advantage of its potential in portfolio management? Introduction Current uncertainty is causing very pronounced

In this article, the authors expound on the importance of the factor “revolution” in finance. Factor investing has moved from a bedrock position to a future of innovation and disruption. With respect to factors the authors discuss where we have been and what can we look forward to. What are the

Economic growth differentials are plausible predictors of foreign exchange return trends because they are related to differences in monetary policy and return on investment. Suitable metrics for testing growth differentials as trading signals must replicate historic information states. Two types of

In this video kaggle grandmaster Rob Mulla takes you through an economic data analysis project with python pandas. We walk through the process of pulling down the data for different economic indicators, cleaning and joining the data. Using the Fred api you can pull up to date data and compare,

In the previous post, I reviewed the turbulence index, an indicator of financial market stress periods based on the Mahalanobis distance, introduced by Chow and al.1 and Kritzman and Li2. In this post, I will review the absorption ratio, a measure of financial market fragility based on principal

How often do you think about the weights of the assets in your portfolio? Do you weigh your assets equally, or do you prefer value-weighting? The researchers behind a recent research paper analyzed various weighting schemes and examined their effect on factor strategy return. They studied five

The 2014 study by Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Pedersen, “Betting Against Beta,” established strong support for low-beta (as well as low-volatility) strategies. The authors found that for U.S. stocks, the betting against beta (BAB) factor (a portfolio that holds low-beta assets leveraged to a beta

Random Forests are widely used Machine Learning algorithms. In finance, certain financial ratios are used to try and predict whether or not a company will outperform the market. Can we use the random forest on financial ratios to articulate an investment strategy which outperforms a buy and hold

Investors assume that token prices increase with product utilization in the token ecosystem However, the correlation between the token prices and token volumes has been zero Likely explained by token prices substantially being driven by speculation INTRODUCTION Much of the crypto world is, by

Inflation is perhaps the least well understood phenomenon in economics. Once said to be exclusively a monetary phenomenon, our current predicament is significantly more complicated and there is little consensus as to the root cause. Until recently the concern was that inflation would run permanently