Practical Pairs Trading

Some price series are mean reverting some of the time, but it is also possible to create portfolios which are specifically constructed to have mean-reverting properties. Series that can be combined to create stationary portfolios are called cointegrating, and there are a bunch of statistical tests for this property. We’ll return to these shortly. While …

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Bond. Treasury Bond

The Federal Reserve publishes the yield-to-maturity of US Treasury bonds. However, the actual returns earned by investors are not publicly available. Nor are they readily and intuitively discerned from historical yields, since “a bond’s return equals its yield only if its yield stays constant and if all coupons (cash payments) are reinvested at that same …

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Optimising MetaTrader for Algorithmic Trading

If you’ve ever delved into the world of retail foreign exchange trading, you’ll have come across the MetaTrader platform. Let’s be clear. The platform has its drawbacks. If you’ve traded “grown-up” markets, some of the features will leave you scratching your head. But one thing’s for sure – MetaTrader provides fast, convenient access to pretty …

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Momentum Is Dead! Long Live Momentum!

In our inaugural Algo Bootcamp, we teamed up with our super-active community of traders and developed a long-only, always-in-the-market strategy for harvesting risk premia. It holds a number of different ETFs, varying their relative weighting on a monthly basis. We’re happy with it. However, the perennial question remains: can we do better? As you might …

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Risk Premia Harvesting:
Investing in Things That Go Up

This risk premia post is part of a series derived from one of our recent Bootcamps, in which we developed a strategy for harvesting risk premia. We have allocated proprietary capital to the strategy, and many of our members are trading it too. In our Bootcamps we develop trading strategies in collaboration with the Robot …

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Simulating Variable FX Swaps in Zorro and Python

One of the ongoing research projects inside the Robot Wealth community involves an FX strategy with some multi-week hold periods. Such a strategy can be significantly impacted by the swap, or the cost of financing the position. These costs change over time, and we decided that for the sake of more accurate simulations, we would …

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