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 …
One of the things I’ve noticed from staring at the screen all day for the last few months is that most of the large negative returns in US stock indexes have come overnight. What do you mean by “overnight”? The core stock trading session for US stocks is between 9:30 am and 4 pm Eastern …
In today’s post we are going to be extracting CoT (Commitment of Traders) reports from the CFTC website using a pipeline built on Apache Airflow. What is CoT data? The CoT report is a weekly publication which reports the open positions of market participants in the U.S futures market. It’s published every Friday at 3:30 …
In the eye of the recent storm, with VIX up over 50, many traders were looking to “short the VIX” using products like TVIX. “Surely it’s going to coming back down?” Well yeah, it will, eventually, but that doesn’t mean that you can profitably short VIX products. First, some basics… What is VIX? VIX is …
For simulating stock prices, Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) is the de-facto go-to model. It has some nice properties which are generally consistent with stock prices, such as being log-normally distributed (and hence bounded to the downside by zero), and that expected returns don’t depend on the magnitude of price. Of course, GBM is just a …
Optimisation tools have a knack for seducing systematic traders. And what’s not to love? Find me the unique set of parameters that delivered the greatest return in my ten-year backtest. And do it in under five seconds. That’s certainly attractive. But do you want to hear something controversial? When it comes to the parameters of …
One of the keys to running a successful systematic trading business is a relentless focus on high return-on-investment activities. High ROI activities include: Implementing new trading strategies within a proven framework. An example might be to implement a portfolio of pairs trades in the equity market. Scaling existing strategies to new instruments or markets. For …
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 …
To say we’re living through extraordinary times would be an understatement. We saw the best part of 40% wiped off stock indexes in a matter of weeks, unprecedented co-ordinated central bank intervention on a global scale, and an unfolding health crisis that for many has already turned into a tragedy. As an investor or trader, …
The vector autoregression (VAR) framework is common in econometrics for modelling correlated variables with bi-directional relationships and feedback loops. If you google “vector autoregression” you’ll find all sorts of academic papers related to modelling the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on various aspects of the economy. This is only of passing interest to traders. …
