Industry veterans sometimes remark that successful gamblers tend to make good traders, and engineers tend to make lousy traders. This is a gross generalisation, of course, but one reason is that trading, at the most fundamental level, is a game of pricing uncertain outcomes. This requires probabilistic thinking, and engineers tend to be trained to …
The first thing you need as a trader is a clear edge. What do I mean by “edge?” Edge comes from a market inefficiency that means you can buy cheap and sell rich on average over the long run. Said differently, edge is positive expected value. Expected value is the return you expect to realise …
If you trade liquid stocks or futures contracts, the first thing you will notice about equity options trading is that the contracts are illiquid and the bid/ask spread is wide. This sucks, but it makes perfect sense. There is only one AAPL stock to trade, but there are a ton of different options contracts trading …
In textbooks, one often sees pairs trading algorithms start by regressing prices of Asset A on Asset B to calculate a hedge ratio. I’ve rarely seen anyone actually do this in the real world. That’s because it is a very unstable thing – especially for a pair of volatile assets, and especially over a large …
Steal them from other people If you know other people are making money trading an idea, it is often a good idea to pursue it too. This isn’t school. The market gods give no prizes for originality or showing your work. An edge is an edge however you got to it. But be smart about …
The first fundamental problem traders run up against is that there’s no beginners’ market. You have to compete for good prices with the best in the market. This is a problem. There are a lot of people better at markets than you. If you approach trading in a gung-ho manner, it’s basically like playing in …
Your job, as a trader, is to take all the information we have available now and make a judgment on whether something is trading at the right price or not, given things you can know here: Is it the wrong price? Can we buy it too cheap, or sell it too rich? Let’s say we …
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Volatility Risk Premium (VRP). The VRP makes much more sense (to me, at least) when I have the Equity Risk Premium (ERP) for context and comparison. So, in this article, I want to discuss the ERP and the VRP, their similarities and differences, and how I seek …
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 …
