How to Model Features as Expected Returns

Modeling features as expected returns can be a useful way to develop trading strategies, but it requires some care. The main advantage is that it directly aligns with the objective of predicting and capitalising on future returns. This can make optimisation and implementation more intuitive. It also facilitates direct comparison between features and provides a …

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A Simple, Effective Way to Manage Turnover and Not Get Killed by Costs

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. …

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Quantifying and Combining Crypto Alphas

In this article, I’ll take some crypto stat arb features from our recent brainstorming article and show you how you might quantify their strength and decay characteristics and then combine them into a trading signal. This article continues our recent articles on stat arb: A short take on stat arb trading in the real world …

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Ideas for Crypto Stat Arb Features

This article continues our recent articles on stat arb: In this article, I’ll brainstorm some ideas for predictive features that you could potentially use in a crypto stat arb model. The ideas draw insights from recent discussions and market observations, but of course, you should do your own research. In future articles, I’ll pick some …

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How To Get Historical S&P 500 Constituents Data For Free

spx constituents historical mean return

In this post, we are going to construct snapshots of historic S&P 500 index constituents, from freely available data on the internet. Why? Well, one of the biggest challenges in looking for opportunities amongst a broad universe of stocks is choosing what stock “universe” to look at. One approach to dealing with this is to …

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Revenge of the Stock Pickers

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, …

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Can you apply factors to
trade performance?

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 …

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