A Quant’s Approach to Drawdown: Part 1

Imagine you’ve tinkered for days or even weeks, perfecting a strategy idea that’s showing a whole lot of promise. You’ve meticulously tweaked a mouth-watering Sharpe Ratio out of your backtests….it even survived costs. YES! Systems go, let’s trade it. Imagine this new strategy enters a drawdown.…maybe a lengthy one….maybe from day one! How would you …

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Run Your Trading Like a Business

One of the biggest wins we have at Robot Wealth is in helping aspiring traders see the markets, and profitable trading, for what it really is. Rather than utilising a tried and tested approach that has generated real money in the markets, in practice, many aspiring traders gravitate to seemingly exciting approaches with the weakest …

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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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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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Trading Lessons from Gamblers

Pick the Easy Games Like many sociopaths, Frank Wallace was a fan of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. He wrote a book called “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life”, started a cult based on Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, and got convicted of tax fraud.   “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life” is about getting edges in …

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Backtesting Bias:
Feels Good, Until You Blow Up

In an ideal trading universe (free from backtesting bias), we’d all have a big golden “causation magnifying glass”. Through the lens of this fictional tool, you’d zoom in and understand the fleeting, enigmatic nature of the financial markets, stripping bare all its causes and effects. Knowing exactly what causes exploitable inefficiencies would make predicting market …

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