Trading Lessons from Gamblers

Pick the Easy Games Like many sociopaths, Frank Wallace was a fan of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. He wrote a book called “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life”, started a cult based on Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, and got convicted of tax fraud.   “Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life” is about getting edges in …

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Dual Momentum Investing: A Quant’s Review

I recently read Gary Antonacci’s book Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, and it was clear to me that this was an important book to share with the Robot Wealth community. It is important not only because it describes a simple approach to exploiting the “premier anomaly” (Fama and French, …

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Recommended Reading

If there’s one thing I’ve done a lot of over the last few years, reading would be it. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to devouring any material that I thought might give me an edge in my trading – textbooks, academic papers, blog articles, training courses, lecture notes, conference presentations…anything and everything I could get …

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Exploring Mean Reversion and Cointegration: Part 2

In the first Mean Reversion and Cointegration post, I explored mean reversion of individual financial time series using techniques such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, the Hurst exponent and the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equation for a mean reverting stochastic process. I also presented a simple linear mean reversion strategy as a proof of concept. In this post, I’ll …

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Exploring mean reversion and cointegration with Zorro and R: part 1

This series of posts is inspired by several chapters from Ernie Chan’s highly recommended book Algorithmic Trading. The book follows Ernie’s first contribution, Quantitative Trading, and focuses on testing and implementing a number of strategies that exploit measurable market inefficiencies. I’m a big fan of Ernie’s work and have used his material as inspiration for a great deal …

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Benchmarking backtest results against random strategies

Picture this: A developer has coded up a brilliant strategy, taking great care not to over-optimize. There is no look-ahead bias and the developer has accounted for data-mining bias. The out of sample backtest looks great. Is it time to go live?    I would’ve said yes, until I read Ernie Chan’s Algorithmic Trading and realised …

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