Last week, I wrote a short article about statistical arbitrage trading in the real world. Statistical arbitrage is a well-understood concept: find pairs or baskets of assets you expect to move together, wait for them to diverge, and bet on them converging again. Simple enough. But making it work, especially at scale, is a little …
In textbooks, one often sees pairs trading algorithms start by regressing prices of Asset A on Asset B to calculate a hedge ratio. I’ve rarely seen anyone actually do this in the real world. That’s because it is a very unstable thing – especially for a pair of volatile assets, and especially over a large …
Here in Australia, we’re right in the depths of the silly season. We indulge in long lunches, take days off work, and generally let our hair down. In that spirit, I thought I might have some fun punting shitcoins. (Maybe my definition of fun differs from yours, but let’s run with it). For the uninitiated, …
Let’s talk about carry trades. First, what exactly is a carry trade? A carry trade is a trade that pays you to hold it. A position where, if nothing changes except the passing of time, you expect to make money. Let’s go through some examples. FX carry The classic example is the FX carry trade, …
Steal them from other people If you know other people are making money trading an idea, it is often a good idea to pursue it too. This isn’t school. The market gods give no prizes for originality or showing your work. An edge is an edge however you got to it. But be smart about …
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The Equal Risk Contribution (ERC) portfolio seeks to maximally diversify portfolio risk by equalising the risk contribution of each component. The intuition is as follows: Imagine we have a 3-asset portfolio Assets 1 and 2 are perfectly correlated (correlation of 1.0) Asset 3 is uncorrelated with the other two (correlation of 0.0) Let’s say we …
Exponential weighting schemes can help navigate the trade-off between responsiveness and stability of the inherently noisy estimates we make from market data. We previously saw examples of calculating the exponentially weighted moving average of a vector, and estimating the correlation between SPY and TLT using an exponential weighting scheme [link]. In this article, we’ll implement …
Using Exponentially Weighted Moving Averages to navigate trade-offs in systematic trading A big part of the job of the indie trader is data analysis. We’re always looking in the past data to validate (or more often, invalidate) a hypothesis about what might predict future returns. And one could argue that recent data is more useful …
The first fundamental problem traders run up against is that there’s no beginners’ market. You have to compete for good prices with the best in the market. This is a problem. There are a lot of people better at markets than you. If you approach trading in a gung-ho manner, it’s basically like playing in …
