factor allocation - QuantPedia

Out-of-sample Dataset Before the “Sample”: Pervasive Anomalies Before 1926

November 30, 2021

Data are the key to systematic investing/trading strategies. The hypotheses testing, risk or return evaluations, correlations, and factor loadings rely on past data and backtests. With an increasing speed of publication in finance, critiques of quantitative strategies have emerged. Strategies seem to decay in alpha, post-publication returns tend to be lower, and many strategies become insignificant once rigorously tested (in or out-of-sample). Moreover, some might even appear profitable purely by chance and the repetitive examination of the same dataset, such as CRSP stocks after 1963.

Is there any solution to overcome these limitations? Partially, the design of the novel machine learning strategies consisting of training, validation, and testing sets might help. Perhaps the most crucial part of such a scheme is the usage of the purely out-of-sample dataset. In this regard, the novel research by Baltussen et al. (2021) provides several valuable findings for the most recognized factors. The authors constructed a database of U.S. stocks, including dividends and market caps for 1488 major stocks from 1866 to 1926. The sample can be described as the pre-CRSP period, including independent, pre-publication, and “out-of-sample” data that can be a perfect test for the factors utilized today.

The Quant Cycle – The Time Variation in Factor Returns

November 22, 2021

Although the factors in asset pricing models offer a premium in the long run, they are undergoing bull and bear market cycles in the short term. One would expect that it is due to their connection to the business cycles as the factor premium represents a reward for bearing the macroeconomic risks. A novel study by Blitz (2021) finds that traditional business cycle indicators can’t explain much of the time variation of factor returns as the factors are a behavioral phenomenon driven by investor sentiment. To capture the large factor cyclical variation, the author proposes a quant cycle that is defined by the peaks and troughs in the factor returns corresponding to the bull and bear markets.

Community Alpha of QuantConnect – Part 4: Composite Social Trading Multi-Factor Strategy

November 18, 2021

This blog post is the continuation (and finale) of series about Quantconnect’s Alpha market strategies. This part is related to the multi-factor strategies notoriously known from the majority of asset classes. We continue in the examination of factor strategies built on top of social trading strategies, but the investment universe is reduced based on the insights of the previous part. So, without further ado, we continue where we have left last time.

How to Combine Different Momentum Strategies

November 15, 2021

Today we will again talk more about the portfolio management theory, and we will focus on techniques for combining quantitative strategies into one multi-strategy portfolio. So, let’s imagine we already have a set of profitable investment strategies, and we need to combine them. The goal of such “strategy allocation” usually is to achieve the best risk-adjusted return possible. There is no single correct solution to this task, but there are a few methods that we can try.

The “appropriate combination” highly depends on the type of strategies we are about to combine. Are we combining equity and bond strategies together? Are we combining equity strategies, with each one having an entirely different logic? Or do we rather need to assign weights to strategies that are similar in nature yet still different? We will focus this article on the last option – combining similar yet different strategies.

Six Examples of Trading Strategies That Use Alternative Data

October 26, 2021

Why has been alternative data recently so much popular? The answer most of the time hovers around the notion of “seeking the new alpha sources”. First, the hunt for alpha is huge due to the low yield world and is getting only bigger. Secondly, some of the more popular strategies can become crowded, leading to diminishing alpha or the risk of a sudden reversal in performance (all of us remember this year’s growth vs. value switch).

We at Quantpedia don’t create nor manage any alternative data sets. But we are aware of this trend, and we strive hard to find new alpha opportunities which may lie in these new data sources. From the database of almost 700 quantitative investment strategies Quantpedia has gathered, almost 100 strategies are based on alternative datasets. Today, we picked just 6 of them to give you a little taste of how these alternative strategies may look like, what kind of datasets they utilize and how they perform.

Introduction to Clustering Methods In Portfolio Management – Part 2

September 22, 2021

October’s is coming, and we continue our short series of introductory articles about portfolio clustering methods we will soon use in our new Quantpedia Pro report. In the previous blog, we introduced three clustering methods and discussed the pros and cons of each one. Additionally, we showed a few examples of clustering, and we presented various methods for picking an optimal number of clusters.

This section demonstrates the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) – a centroid-based clustering method, Hierarchical Clustering, which uses machine learning and Gaussian Mixture Model based on probability distribution and applies all three methods to an investment portfolio that consists of eight liquid ETFs.

Community Alpha of QuantConnect – Part 3: Adjusted Social Trading Factor Strategies

September 20, 2021

This blog post is the continuation of series about Quantconnect’s Alpha market strategies. Part 1 is here and Part 2 can be found here. This part is related to the factor strategies notoriously known from the majority of asset classes. We continue in the examination of factor strategies built on top of social trading strategies, but in this part, the investment universe is reduced based on the insights of the last part. So, without further ado, we continue where we have left last time.

Introduction to Clustering Methods In Portfolio Management – Part 1

September 16, 2021

At the beginning of October, we plan to introduce for our Quantpedia Pro clients a new Quantpedia Pro report dedicated to clustering methods in portfolio management. The theory behind this report is more extensive; therefore, we have decided to split the introduction into our methodology into three parts. We will publish them in the next few weeks before we officially unveil our reporting tool. This first short blog post introduces three clustering methods as well as three methods that select the optimal number of clusters. The second blog will apply all three methods to model ETF portfolios, and the final blog will show how to use portfolio clustering to build multi-asset trading strategies.

Find Your Crisis Hedge – Quantpedia Highlights in August 2021

September 6, 2021

Hello all,

What have we accomplished in the last month?

– A new important Crisis Hedge Quantpedia Pro report
– 10 new Quantpedia Premium strategies have been added to our database
– 10 new related research papers have been included in existing Premium strategies during the last month
– Additionally, we have produced 10 new backtests written in QuantConnect code
– And finally, 12 new blog posts that you may find interesting have been published on our Quantpedia blog in the previous month

Factor Exposures of Thematic Indices

August 31, 2021

Numerous new businesses are emerging related to autonomous traffic, clean energy, biotechnology, etc. Without any doubt, these new companies look promising and at least the technology behind them seems to be the future. Moreover, this novel trend is also supported by the most prominent index creators S&P and MSCI. Both providers have created numerous thematic indexes connected to these hot industries. The popularity has caused that ETFs are nowhere behind, and as a result, these thematic indexes could be easily tracked. However, popularity itself does not guarantee the best investment, and we should be interested in these indexes in greater detail. A vital insight provides the novel research paper of Blitz (2021). The findings are interesting – the thematic investors bet against quantitative investors or, more precisely, against the most common factors that are well-known from the asset pricing models.