This is part 2 (part one is here) of an excellent article that examines the feasibility and effectiveness of protecting equity portfolios using traditional passive means and more contemporary active strategies. It is jam-packed with information and analysis that is best consumed in two parts;

In part 1 of this series, we talked about how a market-savvy systematic trader would approach a period of drawdown in a trading strategy. Specifically, they’d: do the best job possible of designing and building their trading strategy to be robust to a range of future market conditions chill out

A couple of years ago on the blog I showed a study suggesting that Labor Day week performance has been somewhat dependent on whether the market has rallied over the 20 trading days leading up to it. I decided to update that study today. Below is a look at post-Labor Day performance when the previous

Value investors earn a premium for holding undesirable stocks The yield curve may identify periods where the premium is more attractive Since 1971, the performance of the Value factor was negative when the yield curve was flattening INTRODUCTION Imagine a portfolio of companies that are plagued by

This is a summary of the recent performance of a wide range of excellent Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies, net of transaction costs. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies

Classic pairs trading strategies have suffered deteriorating returns over time. Can a research pipeline that facilitates the identification and selection of ETF pairs make pairs trading viable again? This post investigates such a pipeline. The problem: pairs wander away Source: Ernie Chan,

In this Article, we will show how to obtain free financial data including: End-of-day and real-time pricing; Company financials; Macroeconomic data. Data sources utilized in this Article include: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); Quandl; IEX; Alpha Vantage. We also provide code to

One of the big problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the CAPM, was that it predicts a positive relation between risk and return. But empirical studies have found the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. Over the last 50 years, the most

It is funny that my last post, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu & Trading – Shiny New Toy, because this post is definitely chasing a shiny toy. I was reading the August 2019 Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities issue and came across the article “Swing Trading 10-Point Breakouts.” The basic

Investors can harvest returns from common equity factors on country level Returns are consistent when combined into a multi-factor portfolio Performance of some factors is comparable to those on single stock level, indicating common drivers INTRODUCTION Factor investing strategies like Value are

In a previous post, we explored the dividend history of stocks included in the SP500. Today we’ll extend that anlaysis to cover the Nasdaq because, well, because in the previous post I said I would do that. We’ll also explore a different source for dividend data, do some string cleaning and

Building trading strategies on futures contracts has the unique problem that a given contract has expiration date, example the 3 month contract on wheat. In order to build a continuous time series across the different contracts we stitch them together, most commonly using an auto roll or some other

Systematic value strategies have struggled in the post-2008 environment, so one that has performed well catches our eye. The Barclays Shiller CAPE sector rotation strategy – a value-based sector rotation strategy – has out-performed the S&P 500 by 267 basis points annualized since it

With a growing availability of filtered (news) and unfiltered (social media) information, the author investigates the following question: Do news or social media contain any information that is of relevance for investment decision making and if so are the two sources are complementary or

Roughly speaking, a tensor is an array (generalization of a matrix) of numbers that transform according to certain rules when the array’s coordinates change. Fixed-income returns across countries can be seen as residing on tensor-like multidimensional data structures. Hence a tensor-valued

Developer: Toby Crabel (Narrow Range N-Day Pattern; Note: Wide Range N-Day Pattern applies a reverse logic of Narrow Range N-Day Pattern). Source: Crabel, T. (1990). Day Trading with Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout. Greenville: Traders Press, Inc. Concept: Volatility cycles

We’ve all heard the say “correlation does not imply causation”, but how can we quantify causation? This is an extremely difficult and often misleading task, particularly when trying to infer causality from observational data and we cannot perform controlled trials or A/B testing. Take for

This is a test of the Quint Switching Filtered strategy from Lewis Glenn. On the surface this is a run-of-the-mill tactical asset allocation strategy based on short-term momentum, not unlike several strategies that we track. But digging a little deeper, we’ll highlight qualities that make this

Over the past few years, financial-news sentiment analysis has taken off as a commercial natural language processing (NLP) application. Like any other type of sentiment analysis, there are two main approaches: one, more traditional, is by using sentiment-labelled word lists (which we will also refer

This is a unique article in that it directly assesses the feasibility and effectiveness of protecting equity portfolios using traditional passive means and more contemporary active strategies. It is jam-packed with information and analysis that is best consumed in two parts; however, a good summary

The rise and fall (?) of Risk Parity is a great case study of the frameworks I have been writing about so far. We start with the concept of “Chasing Diversifiers.” Chasing Diversifiers (link) Although Risk Parity is as close as you get to a pure risk diversification play, just like other

After stumbling across a set of old research notes from 2009 and 2012, we attempt to implement a Cyclicals versus Defensives sector trade out-of-sample. Post-2012 returns prove unconvincing and we find little evidence supporting the notion that PMI changes can be used for constructing this trade.

A classic long-short, multi-factor portfolio has lost close to 20% since 2018 The drawdown is within expectations, but the recovery period is abnormally long However, it’s difficult to argue for structural changes that make factor investing unattractive SEEKING DIVERSIFICATION THROUGH MULTI-FACTOR

There are as many strategies for extracting alpha from the markets as there are traders. Unfortunately, this article will be discussing none of them. If that’s what you’re looking for, I suggest you check out the very sophisticated techniques covered in this video. OK. If you’re still reading,

The R environment makes statistical estimation and learning accessible to portfolio management beyond the traditional quant space. Overcoming technicalities and jargon, managers can operate powerful statistical tools by learning a few lines of code and gaining some basic intuition of statistical

The variance risk premium (VRP) refers to the fact that, over time, the option-implied volatility has tended to exceed the realized volatility of the same underlying asset. This has created a profit opportunity for volatility sellers—those willing to write volatility insurance options, collect the

This post is a summary of a more detailed Jupyter (IPython) notebook where I demonstrate a method of using Python, Scikit-Learn and Gaussian Mixture Models to generate realistic looking return series. In this post we will compare real ETF returns versus synthetic realizations. To evaluate the

This is a test of Movement Capital’s Composite Strategy. It combines tactical asset allocation with passive buy & hold. This balance between strategy risk and asset risk may be psychologically easier to trade, encouraging investors to stick with a smart investment plan when either style finds

I’d argue that a typical investor believes the following–In the past and over the long run, stocks outperformed bonds.(1) However, as highlighted here, an academic paper last year shows that the majority of individual U.S. stocks actually lost compared to Treasury Bills (i.e. the return to

One of the most effective performance reporting formats I know is a Cone Chart, popularized by Bridgewater Associates. Here are some reasons why a Cone Chart is so effective: It clearly establishes ex-ante expectations of both return and volatility. When actual outcomes deviate within expectations,

New research from Axioma suggests that tilting less – through lower target tracking error – can actually create more academically pure factor implementation in long-only portfolios. This research highlights an important question: how should long-only investors think about factor exposure in

The live performance of quant strategies is significantly worse than in backtesting Factor investing returns from research are frequently challenged as being overstated However, the performance of smart beta and long-short multi-factor funds match theoretical returns INTRODUCTION When pitching an

It is options expiration week this week. Options expiration weeks often have a bullish tendency. You can see it broken down by month in this post from March. But the summer months of June, July, & August have not seen that same bullish tendency. August’s performance has actually been net

Towards the end of completing my masters in data science, I started picturing myself doing clever things with machine learning and automated trading. If like me, you have run into the “how do I get historical free tick data” connundrum, then this post is for you. I have structured my post in

Successful and long-lasting quantitative research programs require a solid foundation that includes procurement and curation of data, creation of building blocks for feature engineering, state of the art methodologies, and backtesting. In this project we create a open-source python package

R is an object-oriented programming language and work environment for statistical analysis. It is not just for programmers, but for everyone conducting data analysis, including portfolio managers and traders. Even with limited coding skills R outclasses Excel spreadsheets and boosts information

As an option seller you want the market to stay within the range prognosticated by implied volatility. But what is the historic probability that markets behave as expected? And what other analysis could be done to enhance your chances and find the periods when it is wise to sell an at the money

One of the more popular equity strategies over the past decade is low volatility investing. Simply put, this is a systematic strategy that invests in stocks with lower volatility, either measured by Beta or standard deviation. Why? Well, the low-beta anomaly is the fact that in the past, academics

In my last two posts, Market Timing with a Canary, Gold, Copper, LQD, IEF and much more and Day of Month and Market Timing, I assumed that we earned no interest in cash. Most methods did a good job of telling us when to be in the SPY and when to be in cash. How much could we boost returns by

In a previous post, from way back in August of 2017, we explored the relationship between the VIX and the past, realized volatility of the S&P 500 and reproduced some interesting work from AQR on the meaning of the VIX. With the recent market and VIX rollercoaster, this seemed a good time to

What are the research questions? This paper is the first to examine the impact of including an active share target into the mean-variance optimization process of constructing portfolios. They use the Ceria and Stubbs (2006) approach to robust portfolio optimization as methodology. Monte Carlo

The bond risk premium is the return that investors earn by investing in longer duration bonds. While the most common way that investors can access this return stream is through investing in bond portfolios, bonds often significantly de-risk portfolios and scale back returns. Investors who desire

Given the popularity of Low Volatility, investors might expect structural shifts in the factor characteristics Betas, valuations, sector biases, interest rate sensitivity, and factor exposures are highly time-varying Although these are worth monitoring from a risk perspective, none seem particularly

Are broad measures of public sociopolitical sentiment relevant to investors? Do they predict stock returns as indicators of exuberance and fear? To investigate, we relate S&P 500 Index return and 12-month trailing S&P 500 price-operating earnings ratio (P/E) to the percentage of respondents

The Two Centuries Investments blog from Mikhail Samonov has become a new favorite of mine. More “thought heavy” than “numbers heavy”, Mikhail is a fount of novel ideas. In this piece he describes something I apply in my own investing (though never defined so succinctly): the need to balance

No pain, no premium: risks are the currency that investors need to pay in order to earn excess returns in the long run. Over a period of almost 100 years the Fama-French US market index achieved approximately 10% annualised return but temporarily lost more than 30% on multiple occasions. For no

Moving average is one of the most commonly used smoothing method, basically the go-to. It helps us detect trend in the data by smoothing out short term fluctuations. The computation is trivial: take the most recent k points and simple-average them. Here is how it looks: Moving average example with

This is a summary of the recent performance of a wide range of excellent Tactical Asset Allocation (TAA) strategies, net of transaction costs. These strategies are sourced from books, academic papers, and other publications. While we don’t (yet) include every published TAA model, these strategies

For those of you that don’t know, the idea of creating an open-source package based on Advances in Financial Machine Learning stemmed from Ashu and my master’s project at WorldQuant University. The initial goal was to build out a package that we could leverage to help us extend the literature