Recent Quant Links from Quantocracy as of 09/17/2025

Parameter optimization is where good ideas go to either earn their keep or quietly fail. Given a fixed modeling recipe, the optimizer will always return a winner; what it cannot tell youunless you force it tois whether that winner is real. Financial data are dependent, heteroskedastic, regime-prone, and thin on signal. In that environment, any single backtest split can crown a parameter

News Sentiment and Commodity Futures Investing (Yeguang, El-Jahel, and Vu) Media news sentiment is a priced factor in commodity futures. A weekly longshort strategy, buying commodities with the most positive sentiment and shorting those with the most negative, delivers an 8.3% annualized return with a Sharpe ratio of 0.45, after costs. The premium remains significant after controlling for

Macro trading factors are information states of economic developments that help predict asset returns. A single factor is typically represented by multiple indicators, just as a trading signal often combines several factors. Like signal generation, factor construction can be supported by regression-based statistical learning. Dimension reduction is particularly useful for factor discovery. It is

This promising strategy comes from Option Alphas comprehensive research on trading SPX breakouts with zero-day-to-expiration (0DTE) credit spreads selling one option while buying a further OTM option for protection, collecting premium with defined risk. If youre not famliar with Option Alpha, and are serious about trading options, I highly recommend you check them out! (Disclosure: Im

The trade imbalance network and currency returns (Hou, Sarno, and Ye) While past work links a countrys trade balance to predictability of FX returns, this study shows that its position in the global network of deficits and surpluses matters too. The authors create a centrality-based measure (CBC), finding that going long highly central currencies and shorting peripheral ones delivers a Sharpe