theory of portfolio management - QuantPedia

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.

Introduction to CPPI – Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance

July 9, 2021

As we have promised, we present a short article as an introduction into the methodology of the Quantpedia Pro CPPI reports. Quantpedia Pro clients can use the model portfolio built in the Portfolio Manager as a risky asset to test various variants – Basic CPPI, Drawdown Based CPPI and Dynamic Multiplier CPPI.

Markowitz Model

June 14, 2021

We present a short article as an insight into the methodology of the Quantpedia Pro report – this time for the Markowitz Portfolio Optimization. As usually, Quantpedia Pro allows the optimization of model portfolios built from the passive market factors (commodities, equities, fixed income, etc.), systematic trading strategies and uploaded user’s equity curves. The current report helps with the calculation of the efficient frontier portfolios based on the various constraints and during various predefined historical periods. The backtests of the periodically rebalanced Minimum-Variance, Maximum Sharpe Ratio and Tangency portfolios will be available at the beginning of July.
Additionally, there is a Case Study dedicated to this Quantpedia Pro tool.

Risk Parity Asset Allocation

May 7, 2021

This article is a primer into the methodology we use for the Portfolio Risk Parity report, which is a part of our Quantpedia Pro offering. We explain three risk parity methodologies – Naive Risk Parity (inverse volatility weighted), Equal Risk Contribution and Maximum Diversification. Quantpedia Pro allows the design of model risk parity portfolios built not just from the passive market factors (commodities, equities, fixed income, etc.) but also from systematic trading strategies and uploaded user’s equity curves.

An Introduction to Volatility Targeting

March 9, 2021

One of the most popular reports in the Portfolio Analysis section of our Quantpedia Pro tool is “Volatility Targeting”. In this article, we will explain some theory behind this portfolio management method. And then, we will go more in-depth, pick several examples and explain some common volatility targeting variants.

A Robust Approach to Multi-Factor Regression Analysis

February 24, 2021

Practitioners widely use asset pricing models such as CAPM or Fama French models to identify relationships between their portfolios and common factors. Moreover, each asset class has some widely-recognized asset pricing model, from equities through commodities to even cryptocurrencies.

However, which model can we use if our portfolio is complex and consists of many asset classes? Which factors should we include and which should we omit? (Especially if we have a database that consists of several hundreds of potential factors). Additionally, we know that equities influence bonds, commodities influence equities and vice versa. Hence the question, what about the cross-asset relationships?

These are the problems and questions we faced when looking for a methodology for our Multi-Factor Analysis report in the Quantpedia Pro platform. This blog post aims to introduce the model, its logic and the method we have decided to use.

Continuous Futures Contracts Methodology for Backtesting

October 3, 2019

No doubt, the correct datasets are the key when one does some analysis in the financial markets. Nowadays, futures contracts are widely spread and popular among practitioners. However, each delivery month is connected with a different price where the price of the underlying asset should stand at a given date in the future (the expiration date). The industry standard for backtesting futures strategies is to construct one data sequence from a stream of contracts. Our short article shows the importance of choosing the correct methodology for building continuous futures contracts data series…