ETF Rotation Strategies in Zorro

At Robot Wealth we get more questions than even the most sleep-deprived trader can handle. So whilst we develop the algo equivalent of Siri and brag about how we managed to get 6 hours downtime last night, we thought we’d start a new format of blog posts — answering your most burning questions. Lately our …

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Deep Learning for Trading Part 3: Feed Forward Networks

This is the third in a multi-part series in which we explore and compare various deep learning tools and techniques for market forecasting using Keras and TensorFlow. In Part 1, we introduced Keras and discussed some of the major obstacles to using deep learning techniques in trading systems, including a warning about attempting to extract meaningful signals …

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We Love Free Data: Replacing Yahoo Finance Market Data

In keeping with our recent theme of providing useful tidbits of algo trading practicalities, here’s an elegant solution that resolves Yahoo’s unceremonious exit from the free financial data space. Regular readers would know that I use various tools in my algo trading stack, but the one I keep coming back to, particularly when I’m ready …

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How to Run Trading Algorithms on Google Cloud Platform in 6 Easy Steps

Earlier this year, I attended the Google Next conference in San Francisco and gained some first-hand perspective into what’s possible with Google’s cloud infrastructure. Since then, I’ve been leaning on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to run my trading algorithms (and much more) and it has quickly become an important tool in my workflow! In this …

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Machine learning for Trading: Part 2

Introduction My first post on using machine learning for financial prediction took an in-depth look at various feature selection methods as a data pre-processing step in the quest to mine financial data for profitable patterns. I looked at various methods to identify predictive features including Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), algorithms with …

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My experience dealing with Zorro’s support team

Disclaimer: I am not posting this at the behest of the developers of Zorro, nor do I receive any form of payment or commission for this post. I felt that I should relay this experience because it was an example of customer service that went way above and beyond the call of duty in terms of …

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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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A framework for rapid and robust system development based on k-means clustering

Important preface: This post is in no way intended to showcase a particular trading strategy. It is purely to share and demonstrate the use of the framework I’ve put together to speed the research and development process for a particular type of trading strategy. Comments and critiques regarding the framework and the methodology used are most …

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Benchmarking backtest results against random trading part 2

In the first part of this article, I described a procedure for empirically testing whether a trading strategy has predictive power by comparing its performance to the distribution of the performance of a large number of random strategies with similar trade distributions. In this post, I will present the results of the simple example described …

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