Many beginner traders don’t realize how variable the p&l of a high-performing trading strategy really is. Here’s an example… I simulated ten different 5 year GBM processes with expected annual returns of 20% and annualized volatility of 10%. (If you speak Sharpe Ratios, I’m simulating a strategy within known Sharpe 2 characteristics.) I plotted the …
I’ve been helping a family friend with his trading. I’ve given him a simple systematic strategy to trade by hand. First, we set expectations We can plot the distribution of historic trade returns from past trading or a backtest as a histogram. This is useful because it gives us a hint as to what …
Broadly, there are three types of systematic trading strategy that can “work.” In order of increasing turnover they are: Risk premia harvesting Economically-sensible, statistically-quantifiable slow-converging inefficiencies Trading fast-converging supply/demand imbalances This post provides an overview of each. 1. Risk Premia Harvesting Risk Premia Harvesting is typically the domain of wealth management, but it’s important to …
Several years ago, I wrote about some experimentation I’d done with data mining for predictive features from financial data. The article has had several tens of thousands of views and nearly 100 comments. I think the popularity of the article lay in its demonstration of various tools and modeling frameworks for doing data mining in R …
I have been sharing examples of simple real-time trading research on my Twitter account. I do this kind of thing a lot in the training program of our trading group – and I’m sharing in the hope that it might also help a wider audience. Here’s a piece of analysis I did recently on a really …
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 …
The S&P index committee recently announced that Tesla, already one of the biggest stocks listed in the country, would be included in the S&P 500. Here’s the press release: Due to TSLA’s size, it was widely expected to have entered the S&P 500 index much earlier – but S&P has some discretionary criteria it applies …
Colaboratory, or Colab, is a hosted Jupyter notebook service requiring zero setup and providing free access to compute resources. It is a convenient and powerful way to share research, and we use it extensively in The Lab. What’s The Lab? The Lab is the RW Pro group’s portal for doing collaborative research together as a …
You rarely meet a rich forex trader. I’ve met plenty of rich traders who trade quant factors or stat arb. Plenty of market makers, futures spreaders and volatility traders that do nicely. But I don’t think I’ve ever met a rich forex trader. Jeez man – what a downer! Don’t run away, we’re gonna turn …
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 …
