volatility effect - QuantPedia

The Risk in Equity Risk Factors

July 9, 2020

The bear markets were and surely would be present in the equities in the future. While many fear them, experienced investors accept that the growth of the equity market cannot be constant and that inherent equity risk often manifests as a painful market drawdown. When someone designs a strategy, it is a general practice to check its performance during such downturns. Therefore, we can recommend an interesting novel research paper by Paul Geertsema and Helen Lu. The selected paper analyzes the risk of the most common equity factors and plots their over- or under-performance during multiple crisis periods since the Vietnam war until the COVID-19.

Authors: Paul Geertsema, Helen Lu

Title: The Risk in Risk Factors

Long-Short vs Long-Only Implementation of Equity Factors

May 26, 2020

How should be equity factor strategies implemented? In a long-only smart beta) way? As a long-short strategy, as most of the hedge funds usually do? Or in a partially-hedged fashion by going long equity factor and shorting market to offset some of the market risks? There is no one universal answer as it depends on the investment mandate and constraints of each fund manager contemplating to implement factor investing strategies. But recent academic paper written by Benaych-Georges, Bouchaud and Ciliberti suggests that it’s a good idea to go in the direction of long-short implementation (if it’s possible). Managing short book can be challenging; however, the added benefit of lower correlation among strategies gives resultant factor portfolio a significant boost in the return-to-risk ratio (even after accounting for realistic implementation and shorting costs).

Authors: Benaych-Georges, Bouchaud, Ciliberti

Title: Equity Factors: To Short Or Not To Short, That is the Question

Bitcoin in a Time of Financial Crisis

March 16, 2020

One of the very often promoted attributes of Bitcoin is said to be its “safe heaven” characteristic. Some cryptocurrency proponents advocate that Bitcoin can be used as a store of value mainly during the economic and financial crisis. We argue that it’s not so.

Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies too) is, in our opinion, fundamentally more similar to stocks of small companies from the technological sector. It is a very speculative bet on blockchain technology. It may seem unrelated to the broader equity market (like the S&P 500 index) during normal times. But when a stressful time comes, investors are more concerned to meet a deadline for the next mortgage payment. This is the time when the speculative bets are closed, and cash is raised. And this is precisely the time when Bitcoin falls as equities do too.

Rational Panic on Markets Because of Coronavirus?

March 10, 2020

Financial markets are in panic mode. Everybody is talking about the next bear market and economic implications of spreading coronavirus to the whole world. People are split into two groups. One group reasons that a new covid-19 virus is just a stronger flu. Other are worried and draw parallels to Spanish flu pandemic with tens of millions of dead.

We would like to show you two charts which can explain why the high market volatility can be completely rational.

Hierarchical Risk Parity

February 21, 2020

Various risk parity methodologies are a popular choice for the construction of better diversified and balanced portfolios. It is notoriously hard to predict the future performance of the majority of asset classes. Risk parity approach overcomes this shortcoming by building portfolios using only assets’ risk characteristics and correlation matrix. A new research paper written by Lohre, Rother and Schafer builds on the foundation of classical risk parity methods and presents hierarchical risk parity technique. Their method uses graph theory and machine learning to build a hierarchical structure of the investment universe. Such structure allows better division of assets into clusters with similar characteristics without relying on classical correlation analysis. These portfolios then offer better tail risk management, especially for skewed assets and style factor strategies.

Authors: Lohre, Rother and Schafer

Title: Hierarchical Risk Parity: Accounting for Tail Dependencies in Multi-Asset Multi-Factor Allocations

Why Do Top Hedge Funds Outperform?

January 30, 2020

Every hedge fund manager and every trader wants to know what strategies are employed in a fund ran by his competition. The curiosity is even stronger if we want to see how strategies are mixed in the kitchen of the most successful hedge funds. Top performing funds are usually notoriously secretive about their portfolios. But we still can learn something from the history of their monthly returns. One such interesting methodology is described in a research paper written by Canepa, Gonzalez, and Skinner. Their analysis hints that the top-performing hedge funds are usually successful because they are able to manage their factor exposure better. They are not dependent so much on classical equity risk factors as average funds are. And if they are exposed to some risk factor, the top-performing hedge funds are able to close underperforming factor strategy sooner than average funds.

Authors: Canepa, Gonzales, Skinner

Title: Hedge Fund Strategies: A non-Parametric Analysis

Pre-Election Drift in the Stock Market

January 23, 2020

There are many calendar / seasonal anomalies by which we can enhance our strategies to gain more return. One of the least frequent but still very interesting anomalies is for sure the Pre-Election Drift in the stock market in the United States. This year is the election year, and public discussion is getting more heated. The current president of the United States and candidate for re-election, Donald Trump, is a peculiar figure who split the population of the United States into two parts, ones who hate him and those who love him. We can probably expect volatile market moves as we will move closer to this year’s presidential election. But this post will not be about politics but about trading. In this post, we will try to uncover a pattern in historical data that shows significant market moves a few days before elections…

Authors: Vojtko, Cisar

Title: Pre-Election Drift in the Stock Market

Why Did Trend-Following Underperform Last Decade?

December 20, 2019

Trend-following funds and strategies were extremely popular after the 2008/2009 crisis. They offered attractive performance, and diversification properties made them a nice addition to investor’s portfolios. Ten years later, “trend-following strategy” is not such a popular word. Strategies didn’t blow-up, but their performance was far from spectacular. What are the main reasons for that? Is it an increased correlation among markets? Are trend rules inefficient? An important recent academic study written by Babu, Hoffman, Levine, Ooi, Schroeder, and Stamelos (all from AQR Capital Management) analyzes trend-following performance for each decade in the last 140 years and uses three distinct factors: the magnitude of market moves, the efficacy of trend-following strategies at capturing profitability from market moves, and the degree of diversification across trends in a trend-following portfolio. They show that it’s the first factor (a lack of large risk-adjusted market moves, positive or negative) that had the biggest impact in the last decade. This suggests that trend-following strategies should be able to deliver better performance in the future if the size of the market moves reverts to levels more consistent with the long-term historical distribution of returns…

Authors: Babu, Hoffman, Levine, Ooi, Schroeder, and Stamelos

Title: You Can’t Always Trend When You Want

Quantitative Easing Increases Connectedness of Equities and Commodities

November 25, 2019

Quantitative Easing policy in the US triggered a massive inflow of liquidity to financial markets. This liquidity, combined with the growing popularity of commodities as an asset class, is a cause for a higher inter-connectedness among equity and commodities markets. A recent academic study written by Ordu-Akkaya and Soytas shows that commodities are not such a good diversifier as they used to be in the past. Moreover, commodity markets are also affected, as periods of higher equity volatility impact commodities significantly more …

Authors: Ordu-Akkaya, Soytas

Title: Unconventional Monetary Policy and Financialization of Commodities

Impact of Currency Volatility on Momentum and Carry Factors

November 5, 2019

What is the impact of volatility (and changes in volatility) on popular Currency Momentum and Currency Carry strategies? That’s the topic of recent academic study written by Duc Hong Hoang, which decomposes foreign exchange volatility into two components, namely, secular (long-term) and transitory or mean-reverting (short-term) components. Long term component captures business cycle effects, while short term volatility usually represents funding tightness or shocks. Carry trade strategy is linked (and therefore partially predictable) to long-run volatility while momentum reacts mainly to short-run risks.

Author: Hoang

Title: Long Run and Short Run Risk Premium in Currency Market