Quantocracy’s Daily Wrap for 05/07/2015

Watering the flowers and pulling the weeds. Letting your winners run and cutting your losers short. There are different expressions for sector rotation, but it is among the most profitable investment strategies we have found, when done in a disciplined way. Sector rotation is based on the idea that there tends to be differencessometimes large differencesin performance between vario

As a follow-up to A Guide to Creating Your Own Smart Beta Fund, let's dive into the high flying paying world of hedge fund management.. Per Investopedia: Hedge funds are alternative investments using pooled funds that may use a number of different strategies in order to earn active return, or alpha, for their investors. Hedge funds may be aggressively mana

A few weeks ago I wrote an article talking about ways to combine value investing and momentum investing. The high level takeaway from that article was to keep value and momentum as separate exposures. This conclusion was based on ranking firms on their combined value and momentum rankings, which can be described as follows: Rank all stocks on value Rank all st

Should Europe decline extend to 10%…

Summary Leveraged ETFs suffer from decay, or beta slippage. Researchers have attempted to exploit this effect by shorting pairs of long and inverse leveraged ETFs. The results of these strategies look good if you assume continuous compounding, but are often poor when less frequent compounding is assumed. In reality, the trading losses incurred in r

Time-Series Momentum was introduced by Moskowitz and Pedersen of AQR circa 2011 and was popularized by Antonacci in 2013 as Absolute Momentum. Both measure the return of an asset in excess of the risk-free rate over some lookback window in order to determine whether to hold a long position in a given asset or whether to hold cash or go short. This method has been used by trend-foll

It has been over a year since I posted Hacking Google Finance in Real-Time for Algorithmic Traders article. Surprisingly, it became the number one URL of QaR that Google has been displaying as a result to various queries and the number two most frequently read post. Thank You! Its my pleasure to provide quality content covering interesting topics that I find potentially useful.

On April 24, we posted what we thought (and hoped) would be our final post concerning the stock markets lengthy trading range. In the post we noted that for only the 8th time in 100 years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) had made it to 30 days without hitting either a 1-month high or low. It was, in our view, a pretty remarkable stat. Little did we know, however, that 8 days la

The High Yield Dividend Champion Portfolio is a publicly tracked stock portfolio on Scotts Investments. Its goal is to capture quality high yield stocks with a history of raising dividends. The screening process for this portfolio starts with the Dividend Champions as compiled by DRIP Investing. The list is comprised of stocks that have increased their dividend payout f

This post is a continuation of the prior post. In this post we will look at the backtest results for dynamic exits of the 80 days-to-expiration (DTE) Iron Condor (IC), with 12 delta short strikes, with different profit and loss exits as a percentage of the initial credit. Recall that these RUT ICs were all constructed with 20 point wide credit spreads. This is a non-directional option