Some Things Just Go Up (If You Wait Long Enough)

  Here’s a chart of long-term asset performance…. The blue line shows returns from US stocks from 1900 to today. That’s a 48,000x increase in nominal value. The yellow line shows the returns from US bonds from 1900 to today. That’s a 300x increase in nominal value. If you look at this in isolation things …

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What Assumptions Are You Making About “Time” In Your Trading?

I recently listened to a podcast about one of the earliest human civilizations – the ancient Sumerians. Apparently, our system of minutes, hours, and days has been with us since the time of these ancient people, who developed it based on a simple base-12 counting system: There are three joints in each of the four …

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My Thoughts on Quantopian’s Closing

I was very sad to learn that Quantopian is shutting down its community services. Quantopian’s efforts to bring quant finance outside of institutions was a genuine game-changer. The educational content was solid, the tech was excellent, and the QuantCon conferences were professional, well-run, and inclusive in a way that you never see at the “finance …

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Trading the US Election – Profiting from “Known Unknowns”

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a US election on the horizon. This is an event of known uncertainty: a “known unknown” in the now immortal language of Donald Rumsfeld. In trading, we sometimes observe marginal pricing inefficiencies around these “known unknowns”. For example, ahead of  stock earnings announcements or significant economic or policy announcements, we tend …

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Book Review: Positional Option Trading by Euan Sinclair

This is a review of Positional Option Trading by Euan Sinclair.  Trading books set a low bar for the reviewer. 99% are full of facile feel-good advice (don’t fight the trend, always use a protective stop). The 1% that are useful tend to either be dry technical treatments (quants who don’t trade), or sporadically helpful …

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How To Be a Quant Trader – Experiments with QuantConnect

  This post presents an analysis of the SPY returns process using the QuantConnect research platform. QuantConnect is a strategy development platform that lets you research ideas, import data, create algorithms, and trade in the cloud, all in one place.  For this research, I’ve used their online research notebook, and it came preinstalled with all …

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Why Aren’t Call Options More Expensive Than Put Options? (In This Toy Example)

call options

In the Robot Wealth Pro Community, we’ve started doing weekend “quant-teasers” where we discuss the solutions to quant problems. Here is a recent one… Why aren’t calls more expensive than puts for an asset which is more likely to go up than down? We have an asset trading at $100 for which the distribution of …

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Why We Use Apache Beam For Our Systematic Trading Data Pipeline

In the world of Big Data, there are lots of tools and technologies to choose from. Choosing the “right” one depends on the things that you are building and the problems you are trying to solve. Trading firms have skilled teams that monitor and deploy data pipelines for their organisation and the technical overhead that …

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