More Intuitive Joins in dplyr 1.1.0 – how to do an asof join on trades and quotes data

dplyr 1.1.0 was a significant release that makes several common data operations more syntactically intuitive. The most significant changes relate to joins and grouping/aggregating operations. In this post we’ll look at the changes to joins. First, install and load the latest version of dplyr: install.packages(“dplyr”) library(dplyr) A new approach to joins The best way to …

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How do I know if I have an edge?

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 …

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Exporting Zorro Data to CSV

Earlier versions of Zorro used to ship with a script for converting market data in Zorro binary format to CSV. That script seems to have disappeared with the recent versions of Zorro, so I thought I’d post it here. When you run this script by selecting it and pressing [Test] on the Zorro interface, you …

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Trading FX using Autoregressive Models

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 …

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How To Be a Quant Trader – Experiments with QuantConnect

  This post presents an analysis of the SPY returns process using the QuantConnect research platform. QuantConnect is a strategy development platform that lets you research ideas, import data, create algorithms, and trade in the cloud, all in one place.  For this research, I’ve used their online research notebook, and it came preinstalled with all …

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Why We Use Apache Beam For Our Systematic Trading Data Pipeline

In the world of Big Data, there are lots of tools and technologies to choose from. Choosing the “right” one depends on the things that you are building and the problems you are trying to solve. Trading firms have skilled teams that monitor and deploy data pipelines for their organisation and the technical overhead that …

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