The benefits of country diversification are well established. This article shows that the same benefits extend to equity factors, such as value, size, momentum, investment, and profitability. Specifically, country factor portfolios reflect both common variation, which we define as the global factor,

Now that the Federal Reserve has begun the process of raising interest rates, and has announced their intention to begin to unwind their policy of quantitative easing (reducing the amount of bonds in their portfolio, either by selling holdings or allowing holdings to mature), investors may be

It has been about 5 months since my last blog post and in this time I have been working away from home, been on summer holiday and spent some time mucking about on boats, so I have not been able to devote as much time to my blog as I would have liked. However, that has now changed, and this blog

This is a test of the Trinity Portfolio from Meb Faber and Cambria Investments, so named for the three key elements of the strategy: (1) a globally diversified mix of assets, (2) a tilt towards the value and momentum factors, and (3) exposure to momentum and trend-following. We’ve titled our test

Why don’t machines rule the financial world? In his September 2017 presentation entitled “The 7 Reasons Most Machine Learning Funds Fail”, Marcos Lopez de Prado explores causes of the high failure rate of quantitative finance firms, particularly those employing machine learning. He then

We are back again with another post on Python. Our last post, “Basic Operations on Stock data using Python” was well received and we are glad to see the number of likes & shares for the post on various quant trading and Python forums. Keep them coming! Financial market data is a very

I recently gave a presentation on Sector trading using the 200-day moving average at the Northwest Traders and Technical Analysts. Some questions asked were: What if we only trade this monthly? What if we used weekly bars to trade only weekly? Wat if we used weekly bars to trade monthly? The reason

Motivation Support Vector Machines (SVM) are among the most popular Supervised Learning techniques for classification and regression, due to their ease in usage to find non-linear patterns. They work by separating data by finding an optimal threshold – known as a decision boundary or hyperplane,

Michael Edesses’ article, “The Trend that is Ruining Finance Research” makes the case that financial research is flawed. In this two-part article series, we will examine the points that Michael raises in some detail. We find his arguments have some merit. Importantly however, his article fails

Equal-weight and volatility-weighted allocations are two common factor allocation frameworks Risk-return ratios are not higher with volatility-weighted allocations Different reasons can explain the superiority of equal-weight allocations INTRODUCTION In July we published a research report “Factors

Averages are often used to summarize data: but sometimes fitting for the average means fitting nothing at all. Expected returns are a meaningful input to portfolio construction, but are unlikely to be the returns actually realized. Reality rarely looks average. The world is dynamic and forecasts can

Asset Allocation in a Low Yield Environment John Huss (AQR Capital Mgt.), et al. August 17, 2017 The year 2016 saw bond yields fall to unprecedented low levels in major developed markets, with nominal yields on 10-year German and Japanese government bonds even turning negative. While yields have

From a seasonality standpoint, there isn’t a more reliable time of the year to have a selloff than this upcoming week. In the past I have referred to is as “The Weakest Week”. Since 1961 the week following the 3rd Friday in September has produced the most bearish results of any week. Below is

The rate of failure in quantitative finance is high, and particularly so in financial machine learning. The few managers who succeed amass a large amount of assets, and deliver consistently exceptional performance to their investors. However, that is a rare outcome, for reasons that will become

Smart Portfolios is about building and maintaining smart investment portfolios. At its heart are the three key questions every investor needs to answer: 1. What to invest in. 2. How much to invest. 3. When to make changes to a portfolio. Author Robert Carver addresses these three areas by providing

As we have mentioned before, here, here and here, there is overwhelming evidence that the number of stock anomalies in the universe is much lower than originally thought. Most of the previous research papers attempt to filter out past anomalies in the literature (generally over 300+) by applying

It was exactly 100-episodes ago when I first had Bert Mouler on the podcast. This week, I’m joined by him again for a second interview… Bert is an algorithmic trader with a serious focus on machine learning. His trading decisions are driven purely by data, and he goes to great lengths to remove

Equity factors can be valued using fundamental metrics Value and Size are cheap while Low Volatility and Growth are expensive Likely more meaningful for medium- to long-term than short-term investors INTRODUCTION The term “Factor Investing” reached an all-time high this year according to Google

In the first three articles of our Dynamic Asset Allocation for Practitioners series (article 1, article 2, article 3), we focused on the first half of the total process. We specified a universe of global asset classes and sorted it on relative strength with 21 different raw and risk-adjusted

In this article series Imanol Pérez, a PhD researcher in Mathematics at Oxford University, and an expert guest contributor to QuantStart continues the discussion of high-frequency trading via the introduction of the limit order book. As we saw in the in the first article of the series, the

Prof. Richard Price, an old friend, co-author, and Alpha Architect advisory board member, is working on some cool new co-authored research that requires audience participation! Dr. Price, alongside Professors Dipankar Ghosh, and Atul Rai, are conducting research to better understand what factors are

What are the research questions? Research has shown that dividends constitute a greater contribution to the returns of a value versus a growth strategy. However, the question remains as to whether or not dividends matter within a style category. For style investors, does dividend policy determine

Continuing a previous post, in which we modeled the relationship in the levels of the VIX Index and the Year 1 and Year 2 CBOE Correlation Indices, we next turn our attention to modeling changes in the VIX index. In case you missed it, the post can be found here: Correlation Cointegration We saw

In a world of anemic asset returns, tax management may help significantly contribute to improving portfolio returns. Ideally, asset location decisions would be made with full investor information, including goals, risk tolerances, tax rates, and distribution of wealth among account types. Without

Correlations between Quality and Growth factors are currently elevated Value is more negatively correlated than usual to Quality, Growth and Low Volatility Monitoring correlations is important for maximising diversification benefits INTRODUCTION The rise of ETFs is often associated with higher stock

Hello all, last week I wrote a guest post featured on Dr. Ernest Chan’s blog which highlighted some of my research while working with QTS Capital Management on social media sentiment analysis and its place in financial models. The focus of this research was on how to derive sentiment signals from

Notes on Part-2 The Data Bid-Ask Spread Analysis How Do Aggregate Bid-Ask Spreads Vary with Days To Expiration? How Do Bid-Ask Spreads Vary with Volume? How Do Bid-Ask Spreads Vary with Volatility? Summary Conclusions Notes on Part-2 Some astute readers in the comments noted that analysis based on

In our final blog post, that finishes the trend-following series, we briefly review the results of the forward-tests of the profitability of various trend following rules in different financial markets: stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. The results of these tests allow us to better

Following on from my recent posts about trading volatility over weekends, I’m now going to briefly look at trading options overnight. Option traders have always complained when they were too long options overnight, expecting to usually lose money on overnight longs. This doesn’t make sense in a

There has been a recent popularity regarding time windows and it is one I completely agree with! There are certain structural changes that happen throughout the 24 hour session and as a trader it is important to take note of these when designing a system or strategy (or just placing trades). For

This paper develops a portfolio allocation framework to study the benefits of style integration and to compare the effectiveness of alternative integration methods in commodity markets. The framework is flexible enough to be applicable to any asset class for either long-short, long- or short-only

My latest post at http://quantsjourney.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/time-of-day-effects-in-fx.html was on time of days effects in FX and I was claiming that you can actually make money with simple strategies depending on time of day. Below you will find 2 very simple strategies you can play with and make

Exploring alternative datasets to augment financial trading models is currently the hot trend among the quantitative community. With so much social media data out there, its place in financial models has become a popular research discussion. Surely the stock market’s performance influences the

One question that I am asked frequently is which operating system to use for quantitative trading research and implementation. The short answer, as of the writing date of this article, is if you want to carry out any serious/mathematical quant trading research (machine learning/deep learning) you

I recently had someone email me about the performance of a strategy I created back in late 2005/early 2006 and traded for a few years. I remember the strategy being a daily mean reversion set up with an intraday pullback entry. I figured it probably had not done well over the last decade. I stopped

Time of day is critical for trading, it is even possible building trading strategies solely depending on time of day (I will keep this for another post) I will be using the concept of quality and define a high quality market, from an intraday timing perspective, as a market when trading range and

There are no silver bullets for profiling risk, but drawdown’s properties arguably give this metric a leg up over most of the competition. The combination of an intuitive framework, simplicity, and sharp focus on how markets actually behave is a tough act to beat. Perhaps the strongest argument in

This is another comparison between R and MATLAB (Python also in the mix this time). In previous rounds we discussed the differences in 3d visualization, differences in syntax and input-output differences. Today is about computational speed. Spoiler alert: MATLAB wins by a knockout. A genuinely fair

Everybody would like to see the future. If you’re a portfolio manager, you’d definitely love to see the future. Many posts here on QuantDare deal with the challenge of predicting the future (with Prophet, Random Forests, Lasso, etc). This time, we talk about something different: imagine we are

In the previous article we looked at how one can use Neural Networks to detect jumps present in returns of a particular stock. In this blog post, we build on the thinking established in the previous article and use a Random Forest to detect jumps present in stock market returns. I have build an

If you’re interested in using artificial neural networks (ANNs) for algorithmic trading, but don’t know where to start, then this article is for you. Normally if you want to learn about neural networks, you need to be reasonably well versed in matrix and vector operations – the world of linear

Volume Filters: Part 1 | Trading Strategy (Entry & Exit) I. Trading Strategy Developer: R. D. Edwards, J. Magee (Volume Filters); R. D. Donchian (Price Breakout Channels). Concept: Trading strategy based on price breakouts confirmed by volume filters (i.e. volume breakouts). Research Question:

Our firm is growing rapidly and we’re looking to hire new teammates (one initially, possibly another down the road). If you are passionate about investor education and helping us deliver affordable alpha, please reach out! We just posted a new job for an execution trader/researcher role. Jack and

This post will investigate the idea of reducing leverage when drawdowns are small, and increasing leverage as losses accumulate. It’s based on the idea that whatever goes up must come down, and whatever comes down generally goes back up. I originally came across this idea from this blog post. So,

Summary The low current market outlook for stocks and bonds paints a gloomy picture for retirees under common retirement forecasting assumptions. However, assumptions such as net investment returns and retirement spending can have a large impact on forecasted retirement success, even for small

August 2017 Trend Following: DOWN -1.61% / YTD: -16.60% August was only slightly negative thanks to a late recovery from the mid-month level, where the index was down by over 5%. The YTD performance is still strongly in the red. Below is the full State of Trend Following report as of last month.

Slightly positive month for the State of Trend Following index but still negative Year-To-Date performance, in the double digits. Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: August return: 0.79% YTD return: -11.1% Below is the chart displaying individual

September 18th is the official publishing date of my second book, "Smart Portfolios: A practical guide to building and maintaining intelligent investment portfolios (Harriman House, 2017)". This blog post will give you some more information about the book, and more importantly help you

SUMMARY Investors can either combine single-factors into a portfolio or sort stocks for several factor characteristics Double-sorting seems to work better for Value & Quality than for Value & Momentum The combination portfolios show the highest risk-return profiles, albeit at lower returns

It’s the fall of 2011. Investors are caught up in fears of another 2008-style financial crisis, this time arising out of schisms in the Eurozone. The S&P 500 is trading at 1200, the same price it traded at in 1998, roughly 13 years earlier, despite the fact that its earnings today are almost