Financial Data Manipulation in dplyr for Quant Traders

In this post, we’re going to show how a quant trader can manipulate stock price data using the dplyr R package. Getting set up and loading data Load the dplyr package via the tidyverse package. if (!require(‘tidyverse’)) install.packages(‘tidyverse’) library(tidyverse) First, load some price data. energystockprices.RDS contains a data frame of daily price observations for 3 …

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How To Get Historical S&P 500 Constituents Data For Free

spx constituents historical mean return

In this post, we are going to construct snapshots of historic S&P 500 index constituents, from freely available data on the internet. Why? Well, one of the biggest challenges in looking for opportunities amongst a broad universe of stocks is choosing what stock “universe” to look at. One approach to dealing with this is to …

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How to Hedge a Portfolio with Put Options

There are 2 good reasons to buy put options: because you think they are cheap because you want downside protection. In the latter case, you are looking to use the skewed payoff profile of the put option to protect a portfolio against large downside moves without capping your upside too much. The first requires a …

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Pairs Trading Literature Review

This post summarises the key lessons of the academic literature that has been published on pairs trading.  The key themes are highlighted at the end of the page. Pair Trading Literature Review Gatev, Goetzmann, Rouwenhorst – “Pairs Trading: Performance of a Relative Value Arbitrage Strategy” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=141615 This is the first meaningful academic paper on pair …

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Are SPX Options Expensive?

Options are non-linear financial products that allow you to do useful things that you can’t easily do with other financial instruments. Let me give a specific illustration of options being useful… The chart below shows the monthly cumulative % performance of our RW systematic trading portfolio since we started trading it in October 2018. The …

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Humility and The Pain Trade

If you don’t bring a humble attitude to the markets, the markets will quickly humble you. Being humble is fundamental to everything we do at Robot Wealth: in our own trading, and in collaborative research in our Bootcamps. The more we trade, the more we are humbled by the markets. The more we are humbled …

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