One of the things I’ve noticed from staring at the screen all day for the last few months is that most of the large negative returns in US stock indexes have come overnight. What do you mean by “overnight”? The core stock trading session for US stocks is between 9:30 am and 4 pm Eastern …
In the eye of the recent storm, with VIX up over 50, many traders were looking to “short the VIX” using products like TVIX. “Surely it’s going to coming back down?” Well yeah, it will, eventually, but that doesn’t mean that you can profitably short VIX products. First, some basics… What is VIX? VIX is …
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, …
The vector autoregression (VAR) framework is common in econometrics for modelling correlated variables with bi-directional relationships and feedback loops. If you google “vector autoregression” you’ll find all sorts of academic papers related to modelling the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on various aspects of the economy. This is only of passing interest to traders. …
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 our previous post, we looked into implementing a Kalman filter in R for calculating the hedge ratio in a pairs trading strategy. You know, light reading… We saw that while R makes it easy to implement a relatively advanced algorithm like the Kalman filter, there are drawbacks to using it as a backtesting tool. …
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 …
Some price series are mean reverting some of the time, but it is also possible to create portfolios which are specifically constructed to have mean-reverting properties. Series that can be combined to create stationary portfolios are called cointegrating, and there are a bunch of statistical tests for this property. We’ll return to these shortly. While …
This risk premia post is part of a series derived from one of our recent Bootcamps, in which we developed a strategy for harvesting risk premia. We have allocated proprietary capital to the strategy, and many of our members are trading it too. In our Bootcamps we develop trading strategies in collaboration with the Robot …
