I just got back from a long vacation in Iceland (highly recommend visiting). As usual, when people discover what I do, they ask me about the markets. Several people were worried that the markets are too high. Then I read that the 20-year return of the SPX from 2001 to 2020 was way below the average

Eric Balchunas had a recent tweet that I found fascinating. Eric’s tweet merely captures the tip of the iceberg with respect to the current market environment, which certainly feels “bubbly.” 1 The gist of the tweet is that $META, which is an ETF from our friends over at Roundhill Investments,

In this brief tutorial we will take a look at the different aspects of end-of-day equities data. We will develop an understanding of what the Open, High, Low and Close (OHLC) prices mean, as well as discuss the traded Volume. We will look at how a typical Adjusted Close price is calculated and the

Direct indexing is one of the growth areas in the asset management industry However, direct indexing represents active management, specifically an inferior approach to it Given the poor track record of active management, most investors should avoid pursuing this INTRODUCTION Direct indexing is hot.

Risk control is absolutely crucial for traders. The first rule of trading is to stay in the game. The humble stop loss is the bread and butter for traders trying to control their risk. But what if I told you the stop loss wasn’t needed? What if you could control your risk while also increasing

Did you know that the percentage of foreign sales of the FTSE 100 is 76% and 43% for the SP500? This study investigates the power of indirect international exposure, that is international exposure through holdings of domestic stocks. The authors ask the following: What is the indirect international

In the previous article Estimating Probability of Bitcoin Pullback in its Bullish Market we touched an interesting point worth exploring a bit further. Namely, the probability of Bitcoin close-price closing each day higher than a day ago days in a row. We had seen that in July 2021 Bitcoin moved and

We use the K-means algorithm to answer two questions regarding portfolio diversification. How diversified is a given portfolio? How can a diversified portfolio be constructed? Additionally, we use the multidimensional scaling (MDS) algorithm to visualize results. Procedure Take the last 120 days of

Though classical option pricing models assume that options are redundant assets, more recent research rejects this idea. However, research on cross-sectional predictors of option returns is relatively scarce and not very well understood. Contrarily, extensive literature examines cross-sectional

Today, arguably more than ever before, the world is governed by the science of probability and statistics. “Big data” is now the norm in scientific research, with terabytes of data streaming into research centers from satellites and experimental facilities, analyzed by supercomputers. “Data

We’re taking a short break from neural networks to return to portfolio optimization. Our last posts in the portfolio series discussed risk-constrained optimization. Before that we examined satisificing vs. mean-variance optimization (MVO). In our last post on that topic, we simulated 1,000

The news story in 2021 that captured the complete attention of the financial press was the Gamestop / WallStreetBets / RoaringKitty episode of late January. A group of presumably small, retail traders banded together on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets forum to drive the price of $GME, $AMC and other

I’m South Korean by birth, but I spent most of my highschool years in Ireland. I wanted to remain in an English speaking country after I graduated, so I chose to go to the University of Waterloo, located in Canada. During the first lecture I attended, I needed to edit something I wrote. I rummaged

When? Wednesday, October 27, 2021 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (Hong Kong Time) Where? At your home, on zoom. All meetups will be online as long as this COVID-19 crisis is not over. The page of the event on Meetup: HKML S4E2 Programme: Talk 1: Systematic Pricing and Trading of Municipal Bonds Petter N.

If you’re new to trading, it may be challenging to know how to get started. There are so many new terms, maths, and concepts, it can seem overwhelming! Now you have to take all that stuff and figure out how to make a profitable system out of it? Most people give up at this point. To address this,

Developed markets have evolved from momentum to mean-reversion markets Other markets like EM or cryptos are momentum-dominated Likely explained by the distribution of retail vs institutional investors INTRODUCTION Markets evolve constantly, but they rarely change structurally. When they do, it is

Understanding the risks of any quantitative trading strategy is one of the pillars of successful portfolio management. Of course, we can hope for good future performance, but to survive market whipsaws, we must have tools for sound risk management. The “Value at Risk” measure is such a standard

In quantitative finance we are used to measuring direct linear correlations or non-linear cross-bicorrelations among various time-series. For the former, by default, one adopts the calculation of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients to quantify a linear relationship between two vectors.

One of the most relevant characteristics of digital assets is the high volatility observed in their prices. In this context, it is necessary that we have an adequate estimate of this parameter. In addition, there is great value in models that seek to predict future asset volatility values, which can

It is widely known that each time the Fed gives an announcement, the whole investing world is watching. So, one may wonder if those events can ruin their investments. Recently in this blog, we have studied a set of variables which might move the market. From this post one can extract that Fed

What is the role of factors in asset allocation? Should investors substitute factor exposures for asset classes in constructing strategic portfolios? Or should factors be used as an instrument to enhance the performance of asset class-based allocation schemes? There are still quite a few questions

A group of strategies, named statistical arbitrage or pairs trading strategies are well-known for being market-neutral gained their popularity among institutional and individual investors. In general, to develop a pairs trading strategy, one needs to figure out two aspects, the first is how to

Past equity market returns seem to predict currency returns Such a currency timing strategy may be interesting as a diversifier However, it is difficult to rationalize the results INTRODUCTION Bloomberg TV at 08:30 am EST: “The S&P 500 futures are trading lower as the US Dollar depreciated

Your biggest investment just took another move higher. It has gotten to the point that you start thinking about taking some profit off the table: it’s looking more and more enticing by the day! Do you do it? If you’re like most investors, you can’t resist taking some money today, even if it

Today we are going to check whether the diversification index proposed by Choueifaty and Coignard (2008) varies over time and some characteristics of this index. The construction of this analysis will be done using python. The Bovespa Index is the main stock index in the Brazilian market and is

Hendrik Bessembinder contributes to the literature on the returns to public equity investment diversification benefits with his study “Wealth Creation in the US Public Stock Markets 1926-2019,” published in the April 2021 issue of The Journal of Investing. The study updated his 2018 paper, “Do

In volatility modelling, a typical challenge is to keep the covariance matrix estimate valid, meaning (1) symmetric and (2) positive semi definite*. A new paper published in Econometrica (citing from the paper) “introduces a novel parametrization of the correlation matrix. The reparametrization

When carrying out systematic trading strategy research one of the main steps is to optimise a collection of strategy parameters to maximise or minimise some objective function. A simple example would be optimising the lookback parameters of the 'fast' and 'slow' moving averages

Let me kick off the series of QuantAtRisk’s podcasts Break into Finance. I address it to all of you who wish to join the financial industry but have no clue how to do it as well as to those of you who would like to make a change, improve your career, get better, and succeed within the industry.

Markov chains are well-known in the world of both mathematics and finance. It is common to describe the market as a group of states, for instance bull and bear. From these two there are different ways to create a great deal of other states. If you want to establish the transition relationship

Although Harry Potter’s world of magic exists on the same earth as our magic-less “Muggle” world, the worlds might as well be on different planets. Each world is governed by its own sets of rules and values, and their residents hardly ever cross each others’ paths. Academia and industry

The Put-Call ratio is often the most commonly used Options-Implied Indicator due to it's simplicity in calculation. However there exists several variations in methodology to calculate it. In this blogpost we give an overview of these different methods and their relevance. The Put-Call ratio can

In a previous post, I introduced the Hierarchical Risk Parity portfolio optimization algorithm1. In this post, I will present one of its variations, called Hierarchical Clustering-Based Risk Parity, first described in Papenbrock2 and then generalized in Raffinot34 and in Lohre et al.5, from which

Traditional pairs trading strategies are prone to failures when fundamental or economic reasons cause a structural break and the pair of assets that were expected to move together are no longer having a strong relationship. Such a break may result in asset price spread having abnormally high

Long volatility exposure is typically achieved via hedge funds A simple DIY strategy would have generated similar attractive diversification benefits Most of the returns are explained by risk-off currencies, government bonds, and gold INTRODUCTION Do-it-yourself is the best and worst financial

Standard performance statistics are insufficient and potentially misleading for evaluating algorithmic trading strategies. Metrics based on prediction errors mistakenly assume that all errors matter equally. Metrics based on classification accuracy disregard the magnitudes of errors. And traditional

We’ve been publishing papers, books and blog posts for over 15 years covering everything from asset allocation strategies and global value investing, to farmland investing, to startups, and even the question of whether or not institutions and endowments should just be managed by a robot. With

Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates L.P. and the creator of the All-Weather investment strategy, recommends having some gold in a contemporary environment. He states, “In a world of ongoing pressure for policymakers across the globe to print and spend, zero interest rates, tectonic

Sustainable investing has grown substantially in recent years, demonstrating that investor demand can be driven by nonfinancial issues such as environmental (E), social (S), and governance (G) characteristics. A full list of our posts on ESG can be found here. The demand from investors who have a

As an application to the windowing technique described the the previous article, John Ehlers proposed a new trend indicator that he claimed is robust and yet simple. The latter is certainly true, as the MAD (Moving Average Difference) oscillator is, as the name says, just the difference of two

Pairs trading or statistical arbitrage is a famous strategy among institutional and individual investors since the 1990s. The concept behind this kind of strategy is straightforward. If the prices of assets move together historically, this tendency is likely to continue in the future. When the

Okay, we can’t keep it a secret, we are fans of value investing 1 So when Cliff Asness and his team at AQR write about value, we get excited. The analysis reported in this research confirms the relationship between static value strategies and future returns while incorporating the notion that the

Corporate insiders often have insight into a company’s private information, which might help them predict how the shares’ price will move in the coming days. However, laws and regulations are designed to keep them from trading based on this knowledge, as it would be unfair and hurt the

Emerging market mutual fund managers struggle to outperform EM hedge fund managers failed to generate meaningful alpha EM opportunities seem to come with proportional risks INTRODUCTION Students often ask me for career advice. It is not a particularly satisfying experience. On the one hand, these

There are many ways one can lose money when investing, and exchange rates are one of the potential risk factors. Luckily, there are several ways to minimize this type of loss in your portfolio. Systematic tactical FX hedging that uses currency factor strategies (for example currency carry, currency

Time-Varying Factor Allocation Stefan Vincenz and Tom Oskar Karl Zeissler (Vienna U. of Economics and Business) September 15, 2021 In this empirical study, we provide evidence on how predictive information can be utilized to profitably allocate a cross-asset factor portfolio, covering various

Because of the complexity inherent to ETF trading in the secondary market, there are frequent misunderstandings about the relationship between the liquidity of the underlying securities and the liquidity of ETFs. Sometimes we hear that ETFs have excess liquidity to the underlying and at others, ETFs

Order book information is crucial for traders, but it can be complex. With the numbers of stocks listed in stock exchanges, it is impossible to track all the available information for the human mind. Therefore, the order flows could be an interesting dataset for machine learning models. The novel

Previously, we have written about the Momentum of News, which highlights that lots of positive news can lead to future positive returns (without a look-ahead bias!). Today’s post builds on the concept that news (and sentiment?) are predictive for returns — which sounds intuitive. The writers of

A simple job ad was placed in a handful of major newspapers calling for participants to be trained as traders. Of the applicants, a total of 23 individuals were chosen to become Turtle Traders: systematic trend followers who simply followed rules and made millions in the process. These were average,