own-research - QuantPedia

Can We Use U.S. Government Shutdowns as a Signal for Investment Decisions?

December 18, 2025

In recent times, we have observed heightened volatility across financial markets. Concerns surrounding government shutdowns, as well as the uncertainty they create, do little to calm these fluctuations. Rather than being purely disruptive, however, such events raise an intriguing question: could these episodes of political and economic uncertainty actually be leveraged to our advantage in investment strategies? In this article, we will examine several asset classes and attempt to assess whether this phenomenon provides a sufficiently relevant signal for investment decisions.

Alternative Market Signals: Investing with the Box Manufacturing Index

December 2, 2025

Investors are increasingly exploring alternative indicators to gain an edge in financial markets. Traditional signals, such as earnings reports or macroeconomic data, often come with delays or may already be priced in. As a result, unconventional metrics have attracted attention. In this article, we examine the Producer Price Index (PPI) for the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Box Manufacturing industry, including corrugated boxes and pallets. Our motivation is to evaluate this index’s effectiveness as a predictive signal for the S&P 500 ETF, sector-specific ETFs, and individual stocks such as Amazon (AMZN), one of the largest consumers of materials tracked by this index. We present several investment strategies that incorporate this indicator and assess whether it can enhance risk-adjusted returns.

Systematic Edges in Prediction Markets

November 27, 2025

Prediction markets are financial platforms where participants trade contracts linked to future events, with prices reflecting collective probabilities. While these markets efficiently aggregate information, systematic inefficiencies create trading opportunities. Notable strategies include inter- and intra-market arbitrage, exploiting price differences across platforms or mispricing within a single market. Behavioral biases, such as the longshot bias, lead traders to overvalue underdogs and undervalue favorites, while bookmakers may manipulate odds to mislead naive participants. Experienced traders can exploit these patterns to secure profits. This article reviews common systematic edges in prediction markets, illustrates their practical application, and highlights the potential for profitable trading.

Leveraged ETFs in Asset Allocation: Opportunity or Trap?

November 16, 2025

In this article, we explore whether it makes sense to incorporate leveraged ETFs into static and dynamic long-only asset allocation strategies. Leveraged ETFs promise amplified exposure to the underlying asset, offering the potential for significantly higher returns during favorable market conditions. However, this comes at the cost of much higher volatility, path-dependency, and the well-known issue of volatility decay, which can lead to substantial underperformance over longer periods. Our objective is to examine if — and how — leveraged ETFs can be systematically integrated into portfolio construction so that their benefits can be captured while mitigating their inherent risks.

How to Design a Simple Multi-Timeframe Trend Strategy on Bitcoin

November 13, 2025

Bitcoin is one of the most widely discussed financial assets of the modern era. Since its inception, it has evolved from a niche digital experiment into a globally recognized investment instrument with institutional adoption and billions in daily trading volume. Despite its inherent volatility, Bitcoin has demonstrated a strong long-term growth trajectory, making it an attractive candidate for trend-based and momentum-oriented trading strategies. In this study, we apply concepts from technical analysis to construct and refine a trend-following strategy for Bitcoin, progressing step by step from a simple MACD setup toward an improved multi-timeframe model.

The End-Of-Month Effect in Value–Growth and Real‑Estate–Equity Spreads

October 20, 2025

The clustering of excess returns on the final trading days of the month constitutes a robust empirical regularity with significant implications for portfolio construction. We document a month-end premium that is both statistically and economically significant, distinct from the canonical turn-of-the-month (ToM) effect. Our strategy highlights systematic style rotations—particularly shifts in value versus growth exposures, as proxied by the IVE–IVW spread—and documents parallel contemporaneous dislocations between real-estate and broad-equity benchmarks, as measured by the IYR–SPY spread.

Can Technology Sector Leadership Be Systematically Exploited?

October 16, 2025

The U.S. equity market has periodically been dominated by a few technology-driven stocks, most recently the so-called “Magnificent Seven.” Historically, similar dominance occurred during the Nifty Fifty era in the 1960s–1970s and the dot-com boom in the 1990s. These periods of concentrated leadership often led to temporary outperformance, but systematically capturing such gains has proven challenging. Our study investigates the potential to exploit technology sector dominance using momentum-based strategies across Fama–French 12 industry portfolios, analyzing whether long-only, long-short, and rolling-basis approaches can generate persistent alpha, and assessing the limitations of simple timing methods.

Hedging Tail Risk with Robust VIXY Models

September 29, 2025

Extreme market events, once perceived as statistical outliers, have become a central concern for investors. The persistence of sharp drawdowns and volatility spikes demonstrates that the cost of ignoring tail risks is not tolerable for long-term portfolio resilience. While diversification can mitigate ordinary fluctuations, it often fails when markets move in unison under stress. This makes explicit protection against severe downside events not just desirable but necessary. Tail hedging addresses this need by providing a structured defense against the most damaging scenarios, ensuring that portfolios remain robust when traditional risk management tools fall short. Using VIXY ETF, we will present and test a range of hedging strategies designed to protect portfolios under stress. By applying robust testing frameworks, we aim to evaluate how different implementations of VIXY ETF-based tail hedges perform across a variety of market environments, highlighting both their strengths and inherent trade-offs.

Leveraged ETFs in Low-Volatility Environments

September 22, 2025

Leveraged ETFs (such as SPXL – (Direxion Daily S&P 500 Bull 3X Shares) offer amplified exposure to the S&P 500, promising high returns but exposing investors to volatility drag caused by daily rebalancing. This effect can significantly erode performance over longer horizons, particularly during periods of elevated market volatility. Inspired by recent research, The Volatility Edge, A Dual Approach For VIX ETNs Trading, focused on volatility-linked ETNs, we propose a volatility filter that adjusts ETF exposure based on the relationship between short-term realized volatility and implied volatility. By reducing exposure in high-volatility periods and maintaining it in calmer markets, this approach aims to harness leverage effectively while mitigating the most damaging drawdowns.

Surprisingly Profitable Pre-Holiday Drift Signal for Bitcoin

September 8, 2025

Cryptocurrency markets have matured into a distinct asset class characterized by extreme volatility, deep liquidity pools, and worldwide retail participation. Traditional equity and commodity markets exhibit a well-documented pre-holiday effect, where returns on trading days immediately preceding public holidays tend to outperform other days. Given that Bitcoin is often described as the archetypal absolute risk asset, it is natural to hypothesize that any calendar-driven anomalies observed in equities should manifest—or even amplify—in crypto markets.

However, unlike equity markets, where institutional investors and marketing calendars drive collective behavior, crypto markets are more dispersed, retail-dominated, and influenced by nontraditional information flows. This article investigates whether the classic pre-holiday effect applies to Bitcoin and assesses the extent to which it can be amplified by an attention-grabbing momentum filter based on local price highs.