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.

Volatility is one of the best known and most widely used concepts in finance. Given a price series of a financial instrument, its volatility is defined as the dispersion of the returns. This measure is used to compare securities in terms of risk. But in order to compare, sometimes it is necessary to

The fiscal stance of governments can be a powerful force in local fixed-income markets. On its own, an expansionary stance is seen as a headwind for long-duration or government bond positions due to increased debt issuance, greater default or inflation risk, and less need for monetary policy

We have published a new paper on the topic of rebalance timing luck in option strategies: The Hidden Cost in Costless Put-Spread Collars: Rebalance Timing Luck. Prior research and empirical investment results demonstrate that strategy performance can be highly sensitive to rebalance schedules, an

An extract from the chapter on pairs trading from my forthcoming book Equity Analytics

Growth stocks can be defined via valuations, fundamentals, or performance These stocks have generated essentially zero excess returns since 2005 Neither has the inverse basket (low valuations, low growth, low momentum) INTRODUCTION When Yale history professor Sherman Kent interviewed 23 NATO

Do Sector ETFs Outperform Treasury Bills? Gow-Cheng Huang (Tuskegee U.) and Kartono Liano (Mississippi State U.) June 2022 Unlike individual stocks, more than 67% of sector ETFs have lifetime buy-and-hold returns that are higher than the T-bill rates. Thus, the majority of sector ETFs outperform

The year 2022 was a difficult one for investors in traditional 60/40 portfolios, as equities all around the globe and bonds produced double-digit losses, a very rare event. Can factor strategies mitigate risk? That performance has heightened interest in the diversification benefits of factor-based

As you can probably tell by my other articles (for example here, here and here), I am a big fan of GARCH models. Forecasting conditional variance is arguably the best we can get in predicting stock returns out of themselves. Still, the GARCH family is no silver bullet that suddenly makes you a stock

When we first started publicly writing and talking about capital efficiency in 2017 – the predecessor conversation to return stackingTM – the 13-week U.S. Treasury Bill rate sat around 1.30%. The prototypical example at the time was a 1.5x levered 60% stock / 40% bond portfolio (also referred to

Surely everyone has suffered/enjoyed a sudden movement of a stock in a portfolio when the underlying company has reported earnings. Now that the earnings report season is starting you may wonder if there exists a way to avoid those shocks in the stocks without missing performance in your

Continuing the series of blog posts on diversification indicators, I describe in this post a correlation-based measure of portfolio diversification called the diversification ratio, initially introduced by Yves Choueffaty and Yves Coignard in their paper Toward maximum diversification1 and later

This article attempts to demystify the approach and methodology used to characterize the risk and return relationship in private equity today. The illiquid nature of the asset class makes the demystification of private equity returns difficult to achieve under any circumstances. Still, the framework

On Thursday afternoon I witnessed 3 different breadth thrust signals I watch all trigger on the same day. The signals, with link to learn more about them are: Walter Deemer’s Breakaway Momentum (BAM) signal Wayne Whaley’s Advance Decline Thrust (5) from his paper “Planes, Trains, and

Beta-neutral value, momentum, and low volatility factors are currently highly correlated to the S&P 500 The correlation is temporary rather than structural Likely explained by the downturn in tech stocks that benefits these factors INTRODUCTION We recently published our quarterly Factor Olympics

It is needless to say about next big thing in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture and is trained on a massive dataset of text data. This allows it

The Fed’s interest rate actions, which have been a topic of much discussion recently, can be very valuable information when making investment decisions. In particular, this post shows how to improve our sector allocation following the Fed’s announcements. Introduction The Federal Reserve System

The Hurst exponent is a statistical measure of long-term memory of time series. The existence and form of such memory are of great interest in financial markets, as financial returns are not generally governed by random walks. The Hurst exponent is a single scalar value that indicates if a time

In his 2011 presidential address to the American Finance Association, John Cochrane coined the term “zoo of factors,” reflecting concerns about the quality of financial research. How do you separate the signal from the noise? In our book “Your Complete Guide to Factor-Based Investing,”

The volatility of interest rates in 2022 has been indeed extreme. In Figure 1, I show the dependence the between the MOVE index (which measures the implied volatility of one-month options on UST bond futures and which is constructed similarly to the VIX index for implied volatilities of the S&P

Alternative credit funds aim to provide returns uncorrelated to traditional fixed income markets However, most of the performance can be explained by equities and plain-vanilla bonds All funds have lost money in the last 12 months, indicating that they are not alternative enough INTRODUCTION As

Russia’s economy was already in decline before the WW1 began, and its involvement in the conflict only exacerbated the situation. By 1917, russia was on the verge of collapse, with widespread poverty and a deep political divides. In March Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, and a provisional

We have already published a few articles about how the different market cycles affect the performance of your portfolio and performance of market factors. So far, these states of the market were identified in-sample, with the benefit of hindsight. The full methodology of how we defined bull/ bear

Happy new year. I didn't post very much in 2022, because I was in the process of writing a new book (out in April!). Save a few loose ends, my work on that project is pretty much done. Now I have some research topics I will be looking at this year, with the intention of returning to something

Would you rather choose a trading system that wins small amounts most of the time but when it loses, the loss is big? Or would you rather choose a trading system that loses small amounts most of the time but when it wins, the gain is big? In this blog post, we will examine such systems from the risk

Despite the widespread popularity of trend-following investing, little is known about optimal trend-following with transaction costs. A few existing studies consider this question using a continuous-time model within the stochastic optimal control theory framework. However, despite being

Introducing the first book ever generated by an artificial intelligence on the subject of using machine learning for quantitative trading: “From Data to Trade: A Quantitative Approach to Machine Learning”! This groundbreaking work offers a unique perspective on the use of machine learning in the

As per usual this point in time, I check my blog’s traffic-analytics to see which were the most popular pieces last year. Without further ado.. First: Correlation and Correlation Structure (6) – Distance Correlation (08:33 minutes average time on page) Second: Similarity and Dissimilarity

2022 is the best year for factor investing over the last decade Value generated the best and size the worst return in 2022 Despite the strong returns, investors remain cautious on factor investing INTRODUCTION We present the performance of five well-known factors on an annual basis for the last 10

In this article about asset pricing theory, we examine the research on the impact of technological advances that displace human labor in favor of machine capital to asset pricing. Automation and the displacement of labor by capita: Asset pricing theory and empirical evidence Jiˇrí Knesl Journal of

In the last article, we discussed one advantage of probabilistic forecasts over point forecasts - namely, handling time-to-exceedance problems. In this post, we will examine another limitation of point forecasts: Higher order statistical properties. The ideas will be very familiar to those with a

The relprice Index in the Performance Data table shows the price of the stock relative to the S&P 500 index over a specified period. Let’s look at the median relPrice for all stocks that are currently members of the S&P500 index, eliminating any for which the relevant Performance Data is

Generally speaking, one of the major attractions of working in the equities space is that the large number of available securities opens up a much wider range of opportunities for the quantitative researcher than for, say, futures markets. The focus in equities tends to be on portfolio strategies