Every time we trade, we incur a cost. We pay a commission to the exchange or broker, we cross spreads, and we might even have market impact to contend with. A common issue in quant trading is to find an edge, only to discover that if you executed it naively, you’d get killed with costs. …
I’m a big fan of Ernie Chan’s quant trading books: Quantitative Trading, Algorithmic Trading, and Machine Trading. There are some great insights in there, but the thing I like most is the simple but thorough treatment of various edges and the quant tools you might use to research and trade them. Ernie explicitly states that …
Anyone that’s been around the markets knows that the monthly release of the United States Department of Labor’s Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) data can have a tremendous impact, especially in the short term. NFP is a snapshot of the state of the employment situation in the US, representing the total number of paid workers, excluding farm …
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 …
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, …
In the first three posts of this mini-series on pairs trading with Zorro and R, we: Implemented a Kalman filter in R Implemented a simple pairs trading algorithm in Zorro Connected Zorro and R and exchanged data between the two platforms In this fourth and final post, we’re going to put it all together and …
In the last two posts, we implemented a Kalman filter in R for calculating a dynamic hedge ratio, and presented a Zorro script for backtesting and trading price-based spreads using a static hedge ratio. The goal is to get the best of both worlds and use our dynamic hedge ratio within the Zorro script. Rather …
This Kalman Filter Example post is the first in a series where we deploy the Kalman Filter in pairs trading. Be sure to follow our progress in Part 2: Pairs Trading in Zorro, and Part 3: Putting It All Together. Anyone who’s tried pairs trading will tell you that real financial series don’t exhibit truly …
Chart patterns have long been a favourite of the technical analysis community. Triangles, flags, pennants, cups, heads and shoulders…. Name a shape, someone somewhere is using it to predict market behaviour. But, we need to find out if there is a grain of truth or reliability in these patterns. Can attempts to objectively measure these …
