A momentum strategy may be implemented at an individual stock level or sector level. Is there an advantage to partitioning stocks into sectors and owning the strongest sector versus buying the highest momentum stocks in the market? Stock momentum funds have been available for a few years and

In a new article from Institutional Investor—“Market Timing Is Back In The Hunt For Investors”–AQR Capital Management reviews the case for market timing and finds an encouraging track record. Citing the historical record from 1900, AQR’s Cliff Asness and two colleagues outline what is

Over the last 40+ blog posts we took a fairly detailed look at the backtest results of 28,840 short straddles on the S&P 500 Index (SPX). I provided a bit more detail in these 40+ posts than usual. While I didn't provide all of my analysis on the SPX short straddles, there was enough to

Investors and managers are concerned with "fat tails". In part one of a two part article we look at where fat tails come from and how they can be managed. Introduction “Extreme events”, “nonlinear dynamics”, “power laws”, “flash crashes”, “fractal processes”… a lot of

In the first section, this article describes a Dual Momentum study over an iShares country etfs basket with a new attempt to improve this well-known investing style. I chose iShares because it is the world largest family of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) from BlackRock. Although different stock

My strategies use a market timing indicator to tell me when I should not be trading the strategy. The blog post, Avoiding Stock Market Crashes with the Hi-Lo Index of the S&P500, presented a very simple idea of using new highs vs new lows. The post tests trading the SPY & IEF but I wanted to

It’s well-established in the literature that valuation metrics—such as the dividend yield (D/P) and the earnings yield (E/P), as well as its cousin, the Shiller CAPE 10—provide important information in terms of future expected returns. In fact, these metrics are the best that investors have

What are pros and cons of extending the definition of financial index beyond conventional market capitalization (buy-and-hold) weighting? In the October 2015 draft of his paper entitled “What Is an Index?”, Andrew Lo proposes that any portfolio satisfying three properties should be considered an

Moskowitz, Ooi, and Pedersen (2012) show that time series momentum delivers a large and significant alpha for a diversified portfolio of various international futures contracts over the 1985 to 2009 period. Although we confirm these results with similar data, we find that their results are driven by

What is tail dependence really? Say the market had a red day and saw a drawdown which belongs with the 5% worst days (from now on simply call it a drawdown): weekly SPY returns One can ask what is now, given that the market is in the blue region, the probability of a a drawdown in a specific stock?

Everyone hates drawdowns (those periods when you're losing money whilst trading). If only there was a way to reduce their severity and length.... Quite a few people seem to think that "trading the equity curve" is the answer. The basic idea is that when you are doing badly, you reduce

When a market has already sold off for multiple days and the selling accelerates that can often mark a point where a bounce becomes likely. Monday’s selling triggered the Quantifinder study below. All stats are updated. 2015-11-10 image1 These results appear extremely compelling. The consistency

Ben Carlson of A Wealth of Common Sense blog (and author of a great book by the same name), had a recent post Playing the Probabilities outlining that time has been an investor's best friend (for those investors that have had in some cases quite a bit of time), pointing to the following table.

Summary In the current “Fed on / Fed off” market environment, dollar exposure matters Currency hedged exposures have exploded in popularity in the equity space Using the experience of Canadian investors, we demonstrate the large impact that currency can have on fixed income Investors buying

This post will demonstrate a method to create an ensemble filter based on a trade-off between smoothness and responsiveness, two properties looked for in a filter. An ideal filter would both be responsive to price action so as to not hold incorrect positions, while also be smooth, so as to not incur

Enough blog posts, papers, and books deal with how to properly optimize and test trading systems. But there is little information about how to get to such a system in the first place. The described strategies often seem to have appeared out of thin air. Does a trading system require some sort of

Were in the middle of an academic research project and we ran a simple long-term trend-following model from January 1, 1801 to September 30, 2015. Recently, there has been some research on the performance of trend rules over long periods here (and highlighted by CXO here). Our trend-following

Candlestick patterns were used to trade the rice market in Japan back in the 1800's. Steve Nison popularised the idea in the western world and claims that the technique, which is based on the premise that the appearance of certain patterns portend the future direction of the market, is

Note on Correlation of First Differences of Averages in a Random Chain

Multi-Scale and Hidden Resolution Time Series Models

Multi-scale Random Field Models

Multi-Scale Stochastic Modeling of Dynamics of a Time-Averaged Variable

The best quant mashup links for the week ending Saturday, 11/07 as voted by our readers: Using random data [Investment Idiocy] The Overnight Trading Anomaly in SPY and a Few Notes About Backtesting in R [Price Action Lab] GMO Flows Turn Negative – An Ominous Sign for Risk Taking [EconomPic] The

Laurent Bernut was a systematic short seller with Fidelity for 8 years. His mandate was to underperform the longest bear market in modern history: Japanese equities. Prior to that, he worked in the Hedge Fund world for 5 years. He now runs an automated Forex strategy and travels the world with his

First draft of 'JavaScript for Financial Analysts' Chapter 7. ~ We are all waiting for something, and our computers are no different. Computers are built on four building blocks. CPUs, memory, hard disk and network. Our programs are only as fast as the slowest component. To put

Risk Premia: Asymmetric Tail Risks and Excess Returns

Dynamics of Expected Returns: Evidence from Multi-Scale Time Series Modeling

Anchoring Adjusted Capital Asset Pricing Model

Idiosyncratic Volatility, Momentum, Liquidity, and Expected Stock Returns in Developed and Emerging Markets

Over or Under? Momentum, Idiosyncratic Volatility and Overreaction

I. Trading Strategy Concept: Short-term momentum patterns with a trend filter. Source: Dahlquist, J. R., Bauer, R. J. (2012). Technical Analysis of Gaps. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. Research Goal: Performance verification of the Gap Pattern. Specification: Table 1. Results: Figure 1-2. Trade

1. Motivating Example Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) show that, if you rank stocks according to their returns over the previous 12 months, then the past winners will outperform the past losers by 1.5{\scriptstyle \%} per month over the next 3 months. But, the authors don’t just test this particular

A large body of literature examines whether managers of actively managed funds add value to their investors by generating abnormal returns. Unfortunately, not only do the vast majority fail to do so, but the evidence, as presented in my book, “The Incredible Shrinking Alpha,” demonstrates that

I have a ton of respect for the way in which GMO manages money (their guts to be massively contrarian if that is their view) and I think their thought leadership is about as good as it gets in the industry. That said, I have long had an issue in the way in which they think about investor behavior

Well, at least as far as I can tell. To understand what I am talking about consider the following results generated using daily open/high/low/close data for ticker GDX (an ETF that tracks gold mining stocks). Figure 1 displays the cumulative $ gain/loss achieved by holding 100 shares of ticker GDX

We study several aspects of the so-called low-vol and low-beta anomalies, some already documented (such as the universality of the effect over different geographical zones), others hitherto not clearly discussed in the literature. Our most significant message is that the low-vol anomaly is the

Over the last five blog posts we looked at the automated backtest results for 4040 options straddles sold on the S&P 500 Index (SPX) at 80 days-to-expiration (DTE). Eight different loss approaches were tested on these straddles. On top of these eight loss approaches, tests were conducted with no

We examined 15 famous asset allocation strategies in my last book Global Asset Allocation. (If you haven’t read it yet I’ll send you a free copy.) I would like to have included a lot more tactical ideas in the book but there is a constant struggle between keeping an idea/book simple, but

I am not yet a Bitcoin advocate. Nevertheless, I am impressed with the amount of Bitcoin activity and the progress that advocates are making towards having Bitcoin recognized as a legitimate currency. Right now, I am mostly interested in the technology behind bitcoin and the possibility of working

In Part I of this series, we explored Grinold's Fundamental Law of Active Management, and why the theory leads to misguided conclusions in the presence of asset correlations. In this article we will offer a primer on a useful tool for portfolio evaluation, Principal Component Analysis (PCA),

As you might expect I spend quite a lot of my time using real financial data - asset prices and returns; and returns from live and simulated trading. It may surprise you to know that I also spend time examining randomly created financial data. This post explains why. I also explain how to generate

Backtests have become the weapon of choice for rationalizing various forms of tactical asset allocation, which has become increasingly popular as a risk-management tool since the 2008 crash. The hazards of backtesting—studying how a strategy performed in the past–are well known, which leads some

Many of you are probably aware of the paper from AQR entitled, “Size Matters: When you control for your junk.” We loved the title so much we considered it one of our Top 5 Geeky, Yet Funny, Economic Paper Titles. Of course, great papers often go unread beyond the abstract because they are a bit

Good article on False Discovery Rate – the probability that a significant p-value indicates a true effect and one of the reasons that quant tests and systems generally underperform. For example, Market Stress and Market Stress Automations generally test out at around 85% wins. In real life they

Below is a piece of Python code allowing to download option chains from NASDAQ website. It is basically a big main function relying heavily on BeautifulSoup and wrapped into a class (‘c’est chic’). User provides the ticker, expiry, option type, etc… and is returned option data for all

Serious volatility watchers are always attending a three ring circus. The left ring holds the general market. Center ring has options on the S&P 500 and the various CBOE VIX® style indexes and to the right are VIX futures, Volatility Exchange Traded Products like VXX, UVXY, TVIX, and XIV plus

In the previous post on this topic, we discussed the challenges and statistics involved in selecting a pair of stocks for statistical arbitrage. We understood how by using the co-integration tests we can say within a certain level of confidence interval that the spread between the two stocks is a

October 2015: Trend Following DOWN -9.19% - YTD: +3.36% A strong downward move at the beginning of the month weighed heavily on the index, which did not recover and went on to post its worst return of the year. The YTD performance is still in the black. Below is the full State of Trend Following

The State of Trend Following index posted a strong negative return in October. Enough to take the YTD performance in the red, with another volatile oscillation around the neutral line for 2015. Please check below for more details. Detailed Results The figures for the month are: October return:

The Ivy Portfolio spreadsheet track the 10 month moving average signals for two portfolios listed in Mebane Faber's book The Ivy Portfolio: How to Invest Like the Top Endowments and Avoid Bear Markets. Faber discusses 5, 10, and 20 security portfolios that have trading signals based on