Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 03/31/2016

Gilbert Strang's textbooks have changed the entire approach to learning linear algebra — away from abstract vector spaces to specific examples of the four fundamental subspaces: the column space and nullspace of A and A'. Introduction to Linear Algebra, Fourth Edition includes challenge problems to complement the review problems that have been highly praised in previous editions. The

Deep Blue was the first computer that won a chess championship, in 1996. It took 20 more years until another computer program, AlphaGo, could defeat the best human Go player. Deep Blue was a model based system with a fixed chess library and hardwired chess rules. AlphaGo is a data-mining system, a deep neural network trained with thousands of Go games. Not only improved hardware, but also a

In this post we are talking about autoregressive models and their application to a financial world. This model follows the idea that the next value of the serie is related with the p previous values. Definition of p-order autoregressive model An autoregressive model or AR is a type of modelling that explains predicted variables as a linear combination of the last p observed values plus a constant

Last weeks post on analyzing US equity value and momentum risk premia ended with a question: How much, if any, improvement should we expect by adding a dynamic system for managing exposure to these risk factors vs. a buy-and-hold strategy? What follows is a preliminary effort in searching for an answer. As a preview, the results are mixed, but this may be an artifact of a) focusing on value and

It has been a while since my last post and in the intervening time I have been busy working on the code of my previous few posts. During the course of this I have noticed that there are some further improvements to be made in terms of robustness etc. inspired by this Master's thesis, Improved Learning Algorithms for Restricted Boltzmann Machines, by KyungHyun Cho. Using the Deepmat Toolbox

Exotic options have always been a hobby of mine. One of the curious things about Dodd-Frank was it started to push swap trading onto exchanges. As such, a cottage industry of exchange traded exotics (in the US they're technically swaps) has popped up over the last few years. The biggest of these markets by volume seems to be Nadex so I recently became a member and started playing around with

While much is known about the financialization of commodities, less is known about how to profitably invest in commodities. Existing studies of Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) do not adequately address this question because only 19% of CTAs invest solely in commodities, despite their name. We compare a novel four-factor asset pricing model to existing benchmarks used to evaluate CTAs. Only our