market timing - QuantPedia

Evaluating Long-Term Performance of Equities, Bonds, and Commodities Relative to Strength of the US Dollar

February 10, 2023

The US dollar is the world’s primary reserve currency, is the most widely traded currency in the world (making up over 85% of all foreign exchange transactions), and is used as the benchmark currency for pricing many commodities such as oil and gold. We can say that the US dollar is the blood of the current financial system. A few months ago, we shared how to build a really long-term (nearly 100 years long) history of the USD exchange rate. Therefore, as we already have the data, we can now perform the cross-asset analysis to study the impact of the US Dollar’s strength or weakness on the performance of other asset classes, notably US equities, US treasury bonds, and commodities.

160 Years of Wars and Disasters in Markets

January 27, 2023

Life is not always rosy; many tragedies and unexpected events hurt individuals and society. While some are hardly avoidable, such as natural disasters, some others as wars, are generally only functions of hate and greed. In the case of predictable events, risk measures can be employed, but unexpected outbreaks of aggression can hardly be hedged across the spectrum of different financial assets. We had previously touched on a similar topic and looked at some historical geopolitical shocks and price reactions around that time. Now, we would like to do a short review of an interesting 140-page paper by Dat Mai and Kuntara Pukthuanthong (2022), which, while not providing actionable strategy, provides insightful retrospection and takes war topic modeling to the higher level, covering developing narratives and influence factors extensively.

Size Factor vs. Monetary Policy Regime

January 25, 2023

We have brought attention to the importance of evaluating factors models in different market regimes, and now, we will take a closer look at the size factor. Size [SMB (small minus big)] factor is a popular investment choice for asset investigation by many portfolio managers worldwide. The Size earned prominence in Fama and French’s three and five-factor models, and enjoy the continued discussion about its place in today’s portfolio construction. But it’s crucially important for investors seeking to capture the Size premium to realize that it is dependent on the monetary policy being pursued by the Federal Reserve, as the monetary easing seems to induce a Size premium.

Stock Returns vs Inflation Expectations

December 14, 2022

What happens to the stock prices when inflation expectations decrease or increase? The authors Manav Chaudhary and Benjamin Marrow, in their paper Inflation Expectations and Stock Returns, explore this topic and find that when inflation expectation is high, stock prices also rise in their value. The evidence they present suggests that stocks have been a hedge against expected inflation for the last couple of decades and that this effect is present across stocks from all industries.

How to Paper Trade Quantpedia Backtests

November 18, 2022

Quantpedia’s mission is simple – we want to analyze and process academic research related to quant/algo trading and simplify it into a more user-friendly form to help everyone who looks for new trading strategy ideas. It also means that we are a highly focused quant-research company, not an asset manager, and we do not manage any clients’ funds or managed accounts. But sometimes, our readers contact us with a request to help them to translate strategy backtests performed in Quantconnect into paper trading or real-trading environment. The following article is a short case study that contains a few useful tips on how to do it.

A Simple Approach to Market-Timing Strategy Replication

November 11, 2022

In previous articles, we discussed the ideas behind portfolio replication with market factors. However, overall robustness of the results suffers significantly if the model portfolio or trading strategy we attempt to synthetize is driven by a market-timing model. We do not know the rules driving the underlying strategy we could apply ourselves beforehand. Furthermore, there is no simple mechanism of market-timing rule detection we could potentially utilize in our regression model. Hypothetically, we could include a variety of market-timing strategies into the factor universe. But since there are countless market-timing methods, covering everything is simply unrealistic. Particularly in context of historic factor universe construction. In an attempt to capture the effects of underlying timing rules, we came up with a simple approach to address this problem to a somewhat satisfactory extent.

Stock-Bond Correlation, an In-Depth Look

October 19, 2022

The recent surge in global inflation sent shock waves across financial markets and affected the complicated relationship between stocks and bonds. Today, we would like to present you with a review of two interesting papers, which provide both a deep and easy-to-understand examination of the correlation structure of those two main asset classes. The first paper reviews specifics in various parts of the world, and the second one summarizes known information about the macroeconomic drivers of the US stock-bond correlation.

Are FOMC Announcements Really Informative?

October 14, 2022

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of Fed (Federal Reserve Board/System) meetings which bring announcements usually followed by press conferences are one of the most important events in the rich calendar of investors’ watch lists. They are always closely watched for possible trading opportunities and are full of volatile moves on both long and short sides in fronts of all asset classes ranging from forex, bonds, and equities to nowadays even crypto markets. In our today’s summary, we will take a closer look at some implications that those kinds of financial phenomena bring.

Overnight Sentiment and the Intraday Return Dynamics

September 24, 2022

Overnight and seasonality effects or analysis of sentiment are favorite themes in quantitative academic research. Novel and very recent research from Baoqing Gan, Vitali Alexeev, and Danny Yeung (August 2022) presents us with an opportunity to discover new findings related to both these phenomena. The main takeaway is that the accumulated sentiment from the overnight non-trading period can predict the next period’s intraday stock return.

Automated Trading Edge Analysis

September 2, 2022

Have you ever wondered if your trading asset trends or mean-reverts? Everyone involved in trading or investments daily solves the task of – What trading strategy should I apply to my assets to generate profits? As always, we at Quantpedia will try to help you a bit with this never-ending task with our new tool/report, which will be unveiled next week for all Quantpedia Pro subscribers. The following article serves as an introduction to the methodology we will use to find new trading edges for you automatically.