For questions citing or requesting references to academic and/or professional research.
2
votes
0answers
53 views
Event studies using revenue data vs. measuring abnormal returns
This may be a silly question, but does there exist a methodology for examining the impact of "events" on companies that are not publicly traded? I suppose it would look at abnormal revenues rather ...
8
votes
4answers
337 views
Resources for finding scholarly research on topics in quantitative finance?
A friend and I have taken up an interest in quantitative finance, and we're pretty much starting from scratch—neither of us have backgrounds in finance, but rather electrical engineering and ...
5
votes
1answer
157 views
Toy models of asset returns
When making simple agent-based models of banking systems to look at global properties (say systemic risk) one of the basic decisions you have to make is how to model returns on external (to the ...
4
votes
0answers
146 views
Asymmetric Volatility Modeling (Interpretation)
I am currently writing a paper on asymmetric volatility modeling of brent, gold, silver, wheat, soybean and corn from 1986-2012 and divided them into 4 sub-sample periods (i.e. 1986-1991, 1991-1997, ...
11
votes
5answers
682 views
What are the best Journals & Conferences in Quantitative Finance?
What are some of the most prominent journals, conferences and publishing venues in Quantitative Finance research? Where can I find information more information about them? (e.g. impact factor and ...
3
votes
0answers
183 views
Monty Hall Model
Given a fixed time period,say 3 days, the stock/market can go up,down or stay sideways. A hedge fund can long, short or use rangebound(options strategy) to bet for that 3 days closing level.
Hedge ...
4
votes
1answer
280 views
Why are regressors squared and not ^1.5 or ^2.2 or ^2.5?
When a researcher in economics or finance wants to apply a linear regression model but suspects a non-linear relationship between one of the regressors and the dependent variable, it is typical to ...
3
votes
0answers
60 views
Individual/casual investors and the bias towards blue-chip stocks?
There's quite a bit of research (example, [1]) teasing out the fact that home/casual/individual investors prefer stocks with large positive skewness. It surprised me, as I was reading a bunch of these ...
-1
votes
1answer
326 views
Is it possible to “steal” financial data on publicly traded companies off the internet? Legally, I mean, what is the truth about “data” as a property
What constitutes "stealing" when it comes to publicly posted financial data?
I think there are three instances of this that we can individually vet:
a.) you physically broke into a location or ...
5
votes
2answers
125 views
Economic contagion to individual stocks (ideas for analysis)
I'm doing my undergraduate thesis on firm-level contagion. Specifically I look at a measure of performance over a financial crisis (e.g. raw stock returns), then run cross-sectional regressions with ...
0
votes
1answer
365 views
S&P 500 P/E percentile
I am researching the past five year return for the securities in the top and bottom 10 percentile of the S&P 500 on date 5 years ago. I used Bloomberg to get this data. When I searched for the ...
3
votes
1answer
187 views
mortgage prepayment model
I am trying to develop my own MBS prepayment model. I am confused by the terms SMM and CPR. Are they estimates/models in themselves or are they ACTUAL data for the MBS pool. where can I find actual ...
1
vote
1answer
301 views
FIX Heartbeat message not sent
I am using FIX4.3 and QuickFIX/n v1.0.0 for its implementation.
I came across a situation where i had subscribed for Market Data and was successfully receiving Snapshot message then suddenly all ...
4
votes
1answer
196 views
What is the relative performance of hard-to-borrow securities?
Is there any research on the equity return performance of hard-to-borrow securities?
Many shops will simply screen for hard-to-borrow and eliminate these names from their short book.
Anecdotally, ...
9
votes
6answers
2k views
How high of a Sharpe ratio is implausibly high for a low-frequency equity strategy?
I am looking to convince someone that an annualized Sharpe Ratio of 7 is 'extremely high' for a low frequency (daily rebalancing, say) long-short technical strategy on U.S. equities. I was hoping for ...
1
vote
1answer
227 views
What are the pros and cons of applying for a patent on a financial model or trading system?
I've never understood the purpose of patents in the financial industry.
What would be the pros and cons of applying for a patent on some financial model or trading system?
What would be the ...
6
votes
1answer
130 views
Estimate price movement per unit of volume for daily data
I'm working on backtesting a number of stock trading strategies and need to estimate how much the execution price will likely deviate from the historical close price for that asset using daily data; ...
2
votes
3answers
277 views
Why should there be an equity risk premium?
After years of mathematical finance I am still not satisfied with the idea of a risk premium in the case of stocks.
I agree that (often) there is a premium for long dated bonds, illiquid bonds or ...
6
votes
2answers
225 views
Reseach on when people/institutions sell?
I am curious to know if there have been studies on when selling occurs and if any useful patterns exist. I am particularly interested in the behavior of sellers when they are under water on their ...
2
votes
0answers
81 views
Good Environment, Social, and Governance Indicators to correlate with financial performance of PE
I am trying to see if there is a correlation between the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance and the financial performance of Private Equity (PE) funds.
Are there any suggestions ...
3
votes
1answer
267 views
Cross Bid and Ask prices for Forex trading
I am using ITCH protocol to get the Market Data information for Forex and trying to implement LOB on it and what i have noticed is that Bid and Ask prices are crossing very often.
Should that be ...
3
votes
1answer
393 views
What are some applications of bioinformatics or genetics to generating alpha in U.S. equities?
There are many disciplines that have contributed to how one model's risk and return. Physics introduced Brownian motion and RMT. Machine learning has helped to solve complex portfolio construction ...
2
votes
2answers
458 views
Resequencing of MsgSeqNum in FIX 4.2
I am trying to achieve the following functionality using QuickFIX for FIX 4.2
Send a couple of orders and make sure they’re filled.
Then disconnect.
Change the incoming (from Broker) sequence number ...
2
votes
0answers
219 views
What is an appropriate hedge ratio for hedging a credit instrument with equity of the same issuer?
Given a bond and a stock issued by the same issuer, what is the appropriate ratio of bond-to-stock one should hold in order to minimize the specific risk to that issuer? Equivalently, what is the ...
8
votes
1answer
560 views
Quantitative before/after or financial engineering studies of a bid or ask tax?
Has anyone in the quantitative finance or financial engineering community studied the effects of a bid or ask tax with actual or simulated data?
If so, what were the quantitative results or ...
0
votes
0answers
472 views
What is the current state of the algorithmic trading research? [closed]
Searching for 'algorithmic trading' through scholar.google.com reveals a large list of trading strategies, related on topics like the liquidity of markets, volatility modelling, volume modelling, the ...
4
votes
3answers
561 views
What is the impact of high-frequency trading on market depth, liquidity, and volatility?
On the surface, bid-ask spreads are far more narrow than even several years ago.
However, during periods of financial stress liquidity seems to vanish. Also, the increasing amount of fragmentation ...
1
vote
1answer
680 views
Home/hobbyist quant trading - possible to profitable or just an intellectual hobby? [closed]
I've been researching algorithmic (non discretionary) trading at the several-day to month timescale, i.e. not HFT. I am not interested in voodoo i.e. no technical analysis, I am looking for solid ...
8
votes
1answer
330 views
Any research paper on stop loss?
Has there been any rigorous study on stop loss ? When to apply it?
Has it been shown to work through proper statistical backtests?
I am interested in Equities, preferably European stocks.
5
votes
1answer
131 views
Are there quantitative models which can guide one's choice of target risk?
Note: This question was written for the weekly topic challenge.
Many asset allocation funds presume the investor knows his target risk level, typically on some spectrum from conservative (mostly G7 ...
4
votes
3answers
729 views
What are some of the major quantitative approaches to tactical asset allocation?
Note: This question was written for the weekly topic challenge.
Many of you who deal with asset allocation will probably already be familiar with Mebane Faber's Timing Model, based on one of SSRN's ...
7
votes
0answers
193 views
performance of historical VaR parameters
An historical VaR measure is parameterized in terms of the confidence level and also number of periods. Specifically, the $\alpha$% T-period VaR is defined as the portfolio loss x in market value over ...
3
votes
3answers
316 views
What is the case for active management?
A recent personal finance question asks when to hire an investment professional? Given that many of us here are on the professional manager side of the business, how would you make the case? What ...
14
votes
6answers
2k views
Can social media be applied to algorithmic trading?
Can social media sites, like Twitter, be used to analyze financial markets for algorithmic trading? How much research has been done on this topic?
5
votes
2answers
800 views
How to extrapolate implied volatility for out of the money options?
Estimation of model-free implied volatility is highly dependent upon the extrapolation procedure for non-traded options at extreme out-of-the-money points.
Jiang and Tian (2007) propose that the ...
4
votes
2answers
152 views
How do earnings estimates respond to changes in underlying fundamentals and economic conditions?
Sell-side analysts' earnings estimates for individual companies, typically reported by I/B/E/S, are a key ingredient to many quantitative models. However, revisions to analyst estimates tend to lag ...
10
votes
2answers
587 views
How to forecast expected volatility from high-frequency equity panel data?
I'm wading through the vast sea of literature on realized volatility estimation and expected volatility forecasting (see, e.g. Realized Volatility by Andersen and Benzoni, which cites 120 other ...
9
votes
1answer
388 views
Can VIX be interpreted as a proxy for instantaneous volatility?
BJO06 (Table 2) estimate the following Cox-Ingersoll-Ross model for market variance, $\sigma^2_t$:
$\mathrm{d}\sigma^2_t = (\alpha_0 + \alpha_1\sigma^2_t)\mathrm{d}t + ...
13
votes
3answers
3k views
What is the best way to “fix” a covariance matrix that is not positive semi-definite?
I have a sample covariance matrix of S&P 500 security returns where the smallest k-th eigenvalues are negative and quite small (reflecting noise and some high correlations in the matrix).
I am ...
6
votes
2answers
455 views
optimal re-balancing strategy with asynchronous alpha signal
You want to construct an optimal portfolio.
Let's say you have an alpha signal that arrives with some period (say quarterly). The alpha signal predicts arithmetic returns one-year ahead. You have ...
23
votes
3answers
1k views
What papers have progressed the field of quantitative finance in recent years (post 2000)?
My question is pretty simple: what papers do you feel are foundational to quantitative finance? I'm compiling a personal reading list already, drawn from Wilmott forums, papers referenced in ...
17
votes
6answers
894 views
Why do some anomalies persist while others fade away?
In their 1990 book, A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, Andrew Lo and Craig MacKinlay document a number of persistent predictable patterns in stock prices. One of these "anomalies" is variously known ...
6
votes
3answers
337 views
Should the average investor hold commodities as part of a broadly diversified portfolio?
Many mutual funds sell "asset allocation" products which include appropriately sized investments in a variety of asset classes meant for a prototypical investor. Some of these, such as PIMCO, even ...
10
votes
5answers
2k views
References for developing an automated trading system?
I am looking for references on the architecture of automated trading systems and the trading algorithms behind them. I am more interested in system development than analysis. A couple of books I ...
6
votes
1answer
259 views
Which valuation measures are most useful for equity market timing?
Competing academic studies, such as Asness's Fight the Fed Model and Lee, Myers, and Swaminathan's What is the Intrinsic Value of the Dow, offer differing answers to the question of whether equity ...
4
votes
6answers
2k views
Is there a quantitative finance ranking system for universities?
I am a PhD student in stochastic analysis/control and had a MSc degree in Financial Mathematics.
I am interested in determining there is a quantitative finance ranking system for universities like ...
21
votes
9answers
2k views
Has high frequency trading (HFT) been a net benefit or cost to society?
Various studies have demonstrated the very large and growing influence of high frequency trading (HFT) on the markets. HFT firms are clearly making a great deal of money from somewhere, and it stands ...
12
votes
3answers
2k views
What are the best sources for equity quantitative research?
What are the best sources of quantitative finance research in equities?
I will list a couple and note an asterisk if the research is available by request (i.e. non-clients) or online:
BAC-Merrill ...
7
votes
2answers
1k views
How we can forecast stock prices using chaos theory?
I saw an article in which the writer had mentioned that he used chaos theory to predict stock prices and ended up with a profit over 30%. Chaos theory is basically about finding patterns called ...
11
votes
3answers
2k views
Papers about backtesting option trading strategies
I am looking for all kinds of research concerning option trading strategies. With that I mean papers that publish results on different option trading strategies properly backtested with real-world ...
