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 …
Nearly everyone starts trading with unrealistic expectations. “If I make a 0.5% returns every day I can make over $100k in a year on 20k of starting capital.” 0.5% return every day sounds realistic, right? Wrong. Let’s sense check that… If we could make 0.5% returns every day… then our 20k would be worth: $123,000 …
Every aspiring millionaire who comes to the markets armed with some programming ability has implemented a systematic Get Rich Quick (GRQ) trading strategy. Of course, they don’t work. Deep down even the greenest of newbies knows this. Yet, still, we are compelled to give them a try, just once, just for fun (or so we …
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 …
Options are non-linear financial products that allow you to do useful things that you can’t easily do with other financial instruments. Let me give a specific illustration of options being useful… The chart below shows the monthly cumulative % performance of our RW systematic trading portfolio since we started trading it in October 2018. The …
