I want to discuss a couple of simple trade-off considerations around quant trading signals that may not be obvious. Here’s the price of some asset: Our main job is to predict how it’s likely to move. To do this, you use information about it that you think is predictive. And at any point in time: …
If you try to teach yourself quant trading from the internet or from scientific papers, you run the risk of spending a lot of time majoring on minor stuff. You see it on Twitter all the time. Well-meaning beginner kwants are spending time worrying about niche modelling or inference techniques rather than trying to understand …
In 2021, James, I, and a small team decided to set up a crypto trading venture. We faced several problems, but knowing almost nothing about crypto was the most significant. We sensed that the fractured, developing nature of the crypto market would likely be a good place to seek out inefficiencies, but beyond that, we …
When you do anything with data, you should think about the intuition of each thing you do, and what it represents “in the real world”. Let’s take the example of log returns, which some people tell me they find confusing. Consider an asset whose price goes from $100 to $200 Assume there are no other cash …
Alpha isn’t just about finding people willing to trade at bad prices. Although that’s a necessary condition, it’s not enough. We also need to know why people are willing to buy too expensive or sell too cheap. The reasons are pretty simple: The first reason requires the existence of other uninformed traders, or what some …
Towards the end of last year, we ran a couple of free Zoom webinars on: Here are the recordings: Basics of Edge Extraction Data analysis for Traders The colab research notebook for the second session can be found here. (To make sense of it you’ll want to watch the video.)
In Australia, if you’re serious about getting the job done effectively and efficiently, you might say: “I’m not here to f*** spiders.” Many traders act like they are, indeed, here to f*** spiders. If you’re making soup, you first need a good stock. Stock isn’t exciting. Everyone has stock. Garnish is exciting, but you can’t …
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 recently listened to a podcast about one of the earliest human civilizations – the ancient Sumerians. Apparently, our system of minutes, hours, and days has been with us since the time of these ancient people, who developed it based on a simple base-12 counting system: There are three joints in each of the four …
In this post, we explain how to use SQL to extend back ETF price data with total return data from mutual funds or indexes. On Zero to Robot Master Bootcamp, we teach how to build a portfolio of three automated systematic trading strategies. One of them is a long term Risk Premia Harvesting strategy …
