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How to Use Exotic Assets to Improve Your Trading Strategy

August 26, 2021

As we have mentioned several times, the best course of action for a quant analyst who wants to develop a new trading strategy is to understand a well-known investment anomaly/factor fundamentally and then improve it. Quantpedia is a big fan of transferring ideas derived from academic research from one asset class to another. But that’s not the only possibility of improvement – we can try to embrace Roger Ibbotson’s theory of popularity, which states that popular assets/securities are usually overpriced compared to less-known (exotic) assets/securities. Additionally, more professional investors usually follow popular assets, and this market segment is probably significantly more efficient.

So, we went in this direction. We took a well-known commodity momentum factor strategy and investigated its performance among commodity futures that were part of the S&P GSCI respectively BCOM commodity indexes and then compared the strategy’s performance with a variant that traded only non-indexed commodity futures. As we had expected, the trading strategy using exotic assets performed significantly better.

Impact of US Inflation on Global Asset Returns

August 24, 2021

A lot of attention is centred around inflation in the academic literature. If the inflation is low and oscillates around central banks’ targets, there is not a big fuss around it. However, when inflation gets high, it becomes a hot topic among investors.

The sharp recovery is also accompanied by high inflation, and recent coronavirus crisis recovery has become a hot topic among practitioners. But is the current period of higher inflation truly that bad? Dai and Medhat (2021) show that inflation is not as big a problem as it may seem in the long term. The authors have examined the relationship between US inflation and the performance of global assets such as stocks, bonds, commodities, REITs, factors or industry portfolios. Based on an analysis of both long-term and the most recent sample periods, the results suggest that most assets had positive real returns during high-inflation periods (and low-inflation as well).

The Best Systematic Trading Strategies in 2021: Part 2

August 23, 2021

In the first part of our article, we talked about quantitative strategies which achieved even better results in 2021 than passive US equity investors. Then, we focused more on tendencies and trends among the best quantitative investment strategies. Today we will talk more deeply about specific trading strategies and shortly describe number #10 to number #6 of the best quantitative strategies of 2021.

The Best Systematic Trading Strategies in 2021: Part 1

August 16, 2021

As of the first half of August, the year 2021 seems to be a phenomenal year for equities. World equities have earned more than +16%, and US equities, even more, topping +20% gains. Is there even any better strategy this year than just holding US equities? Well, yes, there are actually several of them. Are they all tied to US equities? Many of them are, but many of them are not. Some of them are not even tied to equities at all.

Note: This blog is Part 1 of a series. Part 2 is available here, and Part 3 is available here.

Community Alpha of QuantConnect – Part 2: Social Trading Factor Strategies

August 13, 2021

This blog post is the continuation of series about Quantconnect’s Alpha market strategies. Part 1 can be found here. This part is related to the factor strategies notoriously known from the majority of asset classes.

Overall, the factors on alpha strategies provide insightful results that could be utilized. The results particularly point to excluding the most extreme strategies based on various past distribution’s characteristics.

Stay tuned for the 3rd and 4th part of this series, where we will explore factor meta-strategies built on top of the QuantConnect’s Alpha Market.

An Important Analysis of Stock Momentum and Reversal Factors

August 11, 2021

Can we explain stock momentum by industry, sector or factor momentum? Moreover, a similar question could be raised about the short-term reversal. The novel research by Li and Turkington (2021) uses a robust regression model to divide momentum and reversal returns into the main drivers. The individual momentum anomaly that broader market groups do not fully explain exists in the whole sample but is statistically weak. On the other hand, the reversal anomaly is highly significant. Secondly, the traditional 12-months momentum can be better explained by the factor momentum than the industry or sector momentum. Still, the industries, industry groups, sectors, and even factors have distinct drivers, and the anomalies seem different.

A Deeper Look into Factor Momentum

June 8, 2021

Momentum seems to be present everywhere and based on academic studies, it is even hard to find assets where the anomaly does not work. Among the large number of research papers related to momentum, the discovery of factor momentum is still relatively new. It is a truly important finding in the world of systematic strategies – there seems to be a return continuation among factors. The novel research of Fan et al. (2021) builds on the recent academic research and shows that, after all, the factor momentum might be different. To be more precise, the authors show that looking at the universe of 20 factor strategies, the factor momentum seems to work and can span individual equity momentum strategies (standard momentum, industry momentum and intermediate momentum). However, the factor momentum is mostly driven by only six factor strategies, and the return continuation of the remaining factors is weak. Additionally, those sixteen non-return continuation strategies cannot span the momentum effects mentioned above. Therefore, the results show that the factor momentum works on the aggregate but individually works much better. In fact, the factor momentum return of the six return continuation factor is significantly better compared to the rest or buy-and-hold portfolio. Moreover, the authors have also identified that the “best” factor momentum strategy is the Betting against beta and conclude that the reason is the unique weighting scheme utilized by the factor. The beta weighting assigns a higher weight to smaller companies, where the momentum tends to be stronger. Overall, the research paper is an important extension of the factor momentum literature.

Crowding in Commodity Factor Strategies

April 13, 2021

Nowadays, factor strategies are widely spread and used by practitioners, but this factor boom has given rise to some concerns. A key question is whether these strategies stay profitable once published and if they are not arbitraged away. Some strand of the literature suggests that there is a performance decay. A different view on performance decay is presented in the novel research of Kang et al. (2021), which indicates that the performance might be time-varying. Using the commodity market and premier anomalies such as momentum, basis, and value, the authors suggest a crowding in the factor strategies that predicts future performance. Crowded factors tend to underperform in future, and there is a significantly negative impact on the expected return. Moreover, the most substantial returns are connected with the least crowding activity. Therefore, the results are especially important for active factor traders.

An Analysis of Volatility Clustering of Equity Factor Strategies

April 8, 2021

Volatility clustering is a well-known effect in equity markets. In simple meaning, volatility clustering refers to a tendency of large changes in asset prices to follow large changes and small changes in asset prices to follow small changes. This interesting effect can be sometimes uncovered as one of the reasons for the functionality of some selected trading strategies. For example, low-volatility months in stock indexes (like the S&P 500 Index) are usually also months with higher performance. As volatility tends to cluster, a low volatility month in the present can signal a low volatility month with a better performance also in the future.

Based on this, we will be testing two hypotheses: (1) firstly, if there is a volatility clustering anomaly present in equity factor strategies; (2) secondly, if there is any performance pattern related to volatility.

An Investigation of R&D Risk Premium Strategies

March 19, 2021

The R&D investments represent a company’s unique expenditure, which is responsible for creating an information asymmetry about the firm’s growth potential and future prospects. In a case when market value reflects only the firm’s financial statements without taking the long-term benefits of R&D investments into consideration, the company’s stocks may be underpriced. On the other hand, the firm’s stock prices may also face overpricing. This might happen in a case when the investors judge the possible future outcomes of current R&D investment based on the past firm’s R&D success, which is not a guarantee by any means.