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 …
When tinkering with trading ideas, have you ever wondered whether a certain variable might be correlated with the success of the trade? For instance, maybe you wonder if your strategy tends to do better when volatility is high? In this case, you can get very binary feedback by, say, running backtests with and without a …
